The Camp and Cult Blogathon-Riki Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991)

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is a film that's gotten  HUGE cult following thanks to the internet. The film is full of so many ultra-gory moments, that it's no surprise the movie became an online phenomena! What is Riki-Oh, you ask? It was an ultraviolent manga, that was adapted into an equally brutal anime, and eventually made into a movie in 1991...

Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky takes place in the futuristic year of 2001 (um...), in a future where prisons have become privatised business'. A man named Ricky-Ho (yeah, not Ricky-Oh...or Riki-Oh-confusing!...Maybe because I watching the dubbed version [which is not a problem, since the dub adds in a few awesome lines!]) is sent to a prison and...stuff happens...VERY gory stuff!...

Riki-Oh starts off at a prison, where the titular character (Louis Fan) is being transferred. After a problem with the jail's metal detector (Ricky's chest is filled with bullets), Ricky is let in along with the other transferred prisoners. The prison is run by the 'gang of four', a group of super tough (as in, if they clap on your head, you won't have a head anymore!) prisoners working for the warden and assistant warden of the prison.

One of the four's lackeys, Samuel, is beating up an inmate with his goons when he's tripped by Ricky onto a board of nails (what was it doing there?) and half of his face is stabbed. Later, Samuel's face is bandaged up and he seems to be talking quite calmly for a guy who had a board of nails rammed into his face and eye!

Samuel wants to get back at Ricky, and he decides to get dangerous inmate 'Zorro' to kill him, and organizes the plan with one of the guards. The next day, Zorro attacks Ricky in the prison showers as Sam watches. Zorro tosses Ricky across a room, but as he charges, Ricky punches through his stomach, making his guts fall out! Samuel then charges at Ricky with a spike, and Ricky stops him by GRABBING SAMUEL'S HAND, LETTING THE SPIKE IMPALE HIS OWN HAND, THEN RICKY PULLS THE SPIKE OUT OF HIS HAND WITHOUT FLINCHING! Ricky destroys Samuel and is taken away by the guards ("Another move and I'll hit you!" says the guard's dub voice to the guy who's just gored two people up!).

After being taken back to his cell, Ricky has a flashback to when he wasn't in prison. He meets his uncle in a cemetery, and the uncle talks about Ricky having super strength since he was a child. Ricky asks to be taught...a martial arts (don't ask me on the spelling), which involves Ricky's uncle tossing tombstones at him!

Due to the bathroom incident, Ricky is brought to see the assistant warden (Mei Sheng Fan). The assistant warden (nope, he's never named) claws Ricky's hand to his table when he refuses to tell the AW where he was for a two year span when he went missing. The assistant warden insults Ricky's (deceased) girlfriend and Ricky hulks out, punching the desk in half, knocking the room's guards out and walking off.

Later, one of Samuel's goons attacked by group for 'being a fink'. Oscar one of the group of four, comes onto the scene and breaks the fight up. After Oscar cuts a prisoner up for insulting him,  the assistant warden tells Oscar to do something to make the north ward stay submissive and gives him a knife (and offers some mints from his glass eye!).

Ricky and Oscar meet up for a fight out in the prison yard, and duke it out in one of the movie's most well known scenes. Oscar manages to temporarily blind Ricky with shredded glass and slice his arm open. Ricky, being an epic badass, washes his eyes out, punches one of Oscar's eyes out, then ties up his arm's split tendons together! Then Oscar commits seppuku, and when Ricky gets close, Oscar pulls out his own intestines and uses them to strangle Ricky! "Alright, you've got a lot of guts Oscar!" the assistant warden gleefully says! You see now why this movie is awesome?

Ricky X-Ray punches Oscar to death (the Terry Tsurugi technique!) , and thanks to Ricky's example, the prisoners start to rebel and are about to attack the assistant warden when the remaining gang of four come onto the scene and gore a few inmates up. Ricky decides to walk off, rather than let anymore prisoners die.

Ricky meets with Oscar's godson Alan, who had his tongue cut out for some reason. Ricky notices that Alan has some poppy leaves on him, and Rogan (Yukari Oshima, a woman, playing a man! And dubbed by a guy too...) sees Alan point where the leaves are. Thenking Alan has betrayed the gang of four, he (*stifles laughter*) takes Alan to the rest of the gang of four and slices him up!

Later that nght, Ricky sees Alan's body, and in a fit of rage, he finds the gang of four's opium greenhouse and burnns it to the ground.

The assistant warden and the remaining gang of four try to handle Ricky, and soon, the menacing warden of the prison finally arrives...

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is an amazing ride! It's ultra-gory, has corny jokes (well, the dubbed version at least), and is very entertaining! It's filled to the brim with craziness-as if the punching people's brains out of their heads, slicing limbs off, intestine-strangling, and head-clap-explodey weren't crazy enough, during the final fight between Ricky and the warden, the warden turns into a giant monster!

Ricky is definitely a cool hero! He's not much of a character, but his super coolness makes up for that! Seriously, if he can rip chains apart and punch people's jaws off, then he's a cool badass dude in my book!

The film's main villain, the warden, doesn't appear until the last half-hour, but he still leaves an impression. He's fun, and makes for an awesome final villain (his explanation for turning into a giant monster?-"The warden of any prison has to be the very best in kung fu!"-Umm, okaay...).

The assistant warden is a fun character, and he sure can survive a lot! He has his one eye punched out, his jugular stabbed with a broken bottle, his arm cut off, and he's thrown through a concrete wall, and he's still alive after all of that! Also, he has a fiiine collection of porn!

One problem the film has is a constantly repeated music tune, but that's not too much of a problem.

The strangest thing about the film is how all the inmates never have their cells locked! If there's a fight going on somewhere, everyone just rushes out of their open cells to watch, and so on!

An apparent plot hole is when Ricky, on the action-hero high that one can only get from pushing the Hulk into a woodchipper, punches straight through the prison's wall and knocks it down!...Why he didn't just do that to begin with I do not know...

So, in closing, if you haven't seen Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, get to it, or else I'll pull my intestines out and super-punch you with them!...

This post is part of the The Camp and Cult Blogathon (I tried to link the Camp and Cult portion of this post's title, but it wouldn't let me, so that's down here...)...