Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
Director: Kgai Kai Lam

Media Asia 1990

By ignore staff

Throughout the Street Fighter franchise, Sonny Chiba probably removed the rare vital organ or three, but the paws of Ricky are different. Ricky, or Ricky!!! as his name is pronounced here, is different. His wily kung-fu fingers snatch out fuckers’ bowels even when applying the zero-pressure of a pick-pocket. The Story of Ricky is that of Cool Hand Luke, but at the end The Man is shredded in one of the bloodiest scenes in all of cinema and there are slimy plops of chink meat for eggs.

Cited as a low point for Hong Kong film, Riki-Oh follows its eponymous character as he is sent to prison for a fatal attack on his girlfriend’s drug dealer. While meditating behind bars, we learn that Ricky is trained in an obscure, venomous form of kung-fu—we think it’s called “chico” and we’re not going back—by an uncle who tosses gravestones at him, which he obliterates in on-smash succession. Around the fifth time Ricky breaks out of chain-restraints inside the prison, you can’t help wonder why the fuck this sociopathic weapon doesn’t burst his way out of the building. But where else can you fight a guy who attempts to strangle you with his intestinal cords (that you made visible)? And also, this ridiculousness in the form of a film needs an ending.

Ricky is the embodiment of every absurdity listed in that updated Chuck Norris chain-email your coworkers circulate once a year in between their thousandth coffee, Snickers and American Idol break-debate. Ricky also plays the flute, plays the leaf-flute and has five bullets lodged in his chest which he alerts prison guards are “souvenirs.”

The action and humor has its head buried up an ass of pseudo-Americanized cheese, but the imbalance of PG-lite (Ricky’s violence is a PSA against opium) and saw-blade machetes dicing nose-deep into a guy’s face and more inverted knees than a Steven Seagal stalker’s dreams carries less weekend-porn existential ickiness than, say, Shaolin Soccer or David Blaine specials. So, when you sigh as Ricky’s abs flex off a dry coat of boobie-trap cement, know that seconds later you'll see him knock the upper half of a guy’s head off with his fist as he shrieks “lousy bastards!”

This discourse of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is written by the staff of ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.