RIKI-OH: THE STORY OF RICKY (1991)
Directed by: Nam Nai-choi
Starring: Fan Siu-wong, Fan Mui-sang, William Ho, Yukari Oshima, Grankie Chin, Gloria Yip, Tetsuro Tanba

It is not news that the prison system is a concrete jungle of injustice, where human lives are traded for a pack of cigarettes, and jailhouse punks are bought and sold for candy bars. For those of you with hearts of stone, THE STORY OF RICKY will fall on your deaf ears, but for those who thirst for prison reform, this movie will move you to tears, will move you to anger, will move you to action!

Convicted of a crime he didn't commit, young Ricky is sent to a penitentiary where an inmate terror group, the Gang of Four, holds sway over the frightened population. Every jailhouse has its crucifixions, its inmates who pull out their own intestines to use as garrotes, its jagged, triangular, saw-toothed machetes that are used to cleave skulls. But the inhumanity of the system is starkly underlined in THE STORY OF RICKY when it raises the question to which the prison industrial complex has no answer: "What kind of prison administrator must turn into a giant monster to control his inmate population?"

Gore paints the screen, tendons are severed, and limbs hacked off con brio. Actors attack their roles like starving dogs in a butcher's shop. Phillip Kwok (one of Shaw Brother's famed Five Deadly Venoms, and the film's fight choreographer) puts in a cameo before his skull is split like a ripe casaba melon. Female martial artist, Yukari Oshima, stands in for the eternally-conflicted nature of gang violence: neither male nor female, not wholly free and yet not wholly a slave. She can kick a dog into pieces with one powerful blow, yet she is capable of a fleeting look of remorse as she stuffs Ricky's mouth full of razor blades and punches him in the face.

See THE STORY OF RICKY and learn about the grim politico-economic realities underlying the inherent inequalities of the penal system, while also learning about people being ground into hamburger meat by hand. THE STORY OF RICKY is a giant star of bad taste that has collapsed inwards on itself and whose enormous gravitational pull has turned it into a black hole of trash capable of destroying our entire universe. Gaze into its heart, oh readers of highbrow film magazines, and despair.