The Kahane--Salem--Zygmund inequality is a probabilistic result that guarantees the existence of special matrices with entries $1$ and $-1$ generating unimodular $m$-linear forms $A_{m,n}:\ell_{p_{1}}^{n}\times \cdots\times\ell_{p_{m}}^{n}\longrightarrow\mathbb{R}$ (or $\mathbb{C}$) with relatively small norms. The optimal asymptotic estimates for the smallest possible norms of $A_{m,n}$ when $\left\{ p_{1},...,p_{m}\right\} \subset\lbrack2,\infty]$ and when $\left\{ p_{1},...,p_{m}\right\} \subset\lbrack1,2)$ are well-known and in this paper we obtain the optimal asymptotic estimates for the remaining case: $\left\{ p_{1},...,p_{m}\right\} $ intercepts both $[2,\infty]$ and $[1,2)$. In particular we prove that a conjecture posed by Albuquerque and Rezende is false and, using a special type of matrices that dates back to the works of Toeplitz, we also answer a problem posed by the same authors.