Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (

1991

) ½

There is something magical about the Cat III Hong Kong movies from the 1980s and 1990s. This is a cinematic world where real chickens are beheaded on camera, where women vomit up live centipedes, where the audience breaths a sigh of relief when a female character is only murdered by a grotesque monster. There has never been such a circus of sleaze and depravity in the history of cinema. Even the Italians of the early 1980s pale in comparison to this shit! Despite the rampant cruelty both to the actors and the audience, the films are never nihilistic or even especially bleak. Quite the contrary, in fact, with only a few outliers they are striving constantly to be entertaining and exciting. It can be rather disorienting, especially for Western audiences, to go from horrific violence to cheap cheeseball jokes, but despite the tonal whiplash, I found myself warming to these films the more I watched. More than any other film industry, the Hong Kongnese seem to understand that you’re watching their movies to be entertained and if more than a minute or two passes by with no action, horror, humor, or sex, the audience will be in danger of getting bored. The Cat III movies seem to be even more frightened of this than their more respectable counterparts, perhaps because the movies are so gross the filmmakers feel the need to overcome your shame in addition to your boredom. As a result, nearly all of them are paced like they were written by an over caffeinate squirrel, jumping from set piece to set piece with a reckless abandon.

Riki-Oh is an unusually good introduction to this particular landscape because it lacks much of the nastiness that the rest of the films of its ilk possess. There are no real animals being killed on-screen (probably the hardest thing for Western audiences to adapt to; Chinese filmgoers are mostly baffled by our squeamishness… where did you think your chicken sandwich came from?), and there is no gratuitous sexualized rape. Hell, the only nudity at all is one guy’s ass in the communal shower. It’s almost a respectable movie. However, there is an absolute boatload of brutal gore. Seriously, we’re talking Dead Alive (1992) levels of carnage here! And unlike Dead Alive (1992) which wore its satirical absurdity on its sleeve, Riki-Oh at least appears to be taking itself completely seriously, which only makes the violence all the more hilarious. The fact that all the special effects look really, really fake only adds to the impact.

Despite seeming like it has no brains whatsoever, this is still a film with a social message, albeit an extremely basic one. In 2001, national governments have overextended themselves to such an embarrassing degree that they have been forced to privatize many industries that were hitherto regarded as the sole preserve of government; prisons among them. It’s at this point that American viewers who have had private prisons since the mid-1980s will probably add in a “yeah and…” Saying that private prisons are bad is hardly a controversial statement, indeed it’s one that I would personally agree with. However, it’s not terribly relevant to the events of the film. Seriously, the least troublesome aspect of this prison is that a few of the higher-ups might be making an extras bit of dosh from its operation, scummy as that business may be. Of larger concern is that fact that the prison authorities have cut a deal with the various gangs that populate the prison’s four wards that basically gives the strongest convicts free rein to do as they please within the walls provided they don’t harm prison authorities or piss off any still stronger prisoners. In practice it plays out like Thucydides truism from the Melian dialogue: “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” The result is that the prison is a living hell, worse than just about any I’ve ever seen in my long history of watching exploitation films.

We see this play out firsthand when Ma, a wimpy middle-aged man who has been locked up for accidentally hitting a pedestrian while driving his pregnant wife to the hospital, gets roughed up by a few gangsters led by Samuel. The brutes even use a block plane to sheer off the poor guy’s nose! Fortunately for helpless old man, there’s a new prisoner in the cellblock, Riki, a freakishly strong martial arts master that hates to see to see wimps get bullied. So Riki teaches Samuel some respect by putting his eye out with a wooden board with a couple of nails in it. Samuel isn’t about to take that laying down though, but he’s well aware that if he tries to fight Riki he’ll be dead in a matter of seconds, so he bribes a guard to let Zorro, a disgustingly obese prisoner, out of solitary confinement and gives Zorro a few bags of rice to kill Riki. Naturally, a hulking fat-ass like Zorro is not a match for Riki and in short order both he and Samuel are dead.

Given the might-makes-right law that seems to govern the inside of the prison, I doubt this is the first time that a tough new prisoner has turned up and cracked a few heads to show the established gangs whose boss. Riki’s antics have made him an object of interest for both the four Heavenly Kings (the most powerful prisoners from each of the four cell blocks) and the assistant Warden (the Warden himself is away from the prison on some other business). The problem is that Riki doesn’t want to play ball with the powers that be, and he’s not about to compromise his moral integrity. This paints a massive target on his back and leads to the strongest prisoner in the North cell block, Oscar to challenge Riki to a duel. Riki defeats him, even after Oscar tries the unorthodox strategy of ripping out his own intestines to strangle Riki with. I’m not even an amateur martial artist, what I know about hand-to-hand fighting is derived almost entirely from movies, but even I can tell you how stupid a plan of attack that is. Unfortunately for Riki, beating one of the Four Heavenly Kings draws the ire of the other three, not to mention the Warden who has just returned from his business elsewhere with his bratty fat-ass son in tow. Life behind bars is just going to get worse for poor Riki.

A word must be said about Assistant Warden Dan because he is one of the most disgusting characters I’ve ever seen committed to celluloid. Part of this is just the actor’s unfortunate physiology, Fan Mei-sheng is a remarkably ugly man under the best of circumstances. But it’s not just his bad looks that make Dan so repulsive to me, it’s well… everything about the character: The way he gorges himself at every opportunity, the way that he constantly stores his fake eye in unhygienic places, the way he grovels in front of the warden, and the way he proudly displays a collection of pornographic videotapes in his office. The result is cartoonish, and more than a little humorous at times, but I can scarcely look at him without feeling somewhat sick. There is a lot of disgusting stuff in Riki-oh, but somehow this perverse little man is the grossest by far.

The violence is fantastic. Nobody is simply killed or slumps over in a heap after being finished off. Instead, guys are getting their heads punched off and their guts ripped out. We have guys getting crushed by traps and getting bisected by blades. Even when the warden breaks out a gun and starts shooting prisoners, they don’t just die regularly. Instead, this gun is loaded with some sort of funky ammunition that causes its victims to blow up like flesh-colored balloons and exploded into a shower of gore and viscera. I have to hand it to Riki-Oh, the film never falls back of simplistic murders or even repeats the same few murder techniques. It’s always doing something new and something delightfully twisted. Essentially what we have here is a like action adaptation of Mortal Kombat [1992] that somehow came out a year before the original game. Indeed, it feels a hell of a lot more like those games than Mortal Kombat (1995) or Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997).

I suspect that a good deal of the more inventive murders were lifted wholesale from the manga that the film was based on. A quick flip through online has convinced me that if anything the film has toned down the absurd gratuitous violence of the original. Oddly enough, I almost never like live-action adaptations of anime and manga when they are produced by the Japanese, they almost always seem overly faithful to the source and lacking in their own identity. The Hollywood adaptations of Japanese cartoons are even worse, to the point where they cannot even make decent adaptations of American anime like Avatar: The Last Airbender. For whatever reason, only the Chinese seem to be able to pull it off, as demonstrated by Riki-Oh, City Hunter (1993), and The Wicked City (1992). Maybe Hollywood should take a page out of their 1990s action movie playbook and simply import Hong Kongnese filmmakers to make adaptations of anime for them. It can’t be worse than Death Note (2017) or Ghost in the Shell (2017).