One of the goriest films I've seen in a very long time, the blow is softened and edulcorated by how unrealistic and camp the action is. That's a good thing.
Take a superhuman kung-fu killing machine and drop him into a privatised prison full of savage officers who treat the inmates worse than the dog-shit you wouldn’t want to step into while wearing your new shoes, and what you’ve got on your hands in a beautifully camp bloodbath.
Following the trail of films leading me to a case-study littered with high-powered red filtered death scenes that left me chuckling maniacally, I finally have my main case study to write about in my essay. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) is my bloodstained goldmine to write about and man do I have lots to write about this which I will save for the actual essay, here I will give you the quick drill on this hilarious masterpiece. With prisons now the bastard child of capitalism, having been completely privatised, Ricky, a 21-year-old martial arts tank gets thrown in there for manslaughter and when he soon comes to realise that he’s been hurled into a viper nest of corruption, venomous treachery and wanton killing, he takes matters into his own hands. Every single person he fights ends up dismembered at best or an indescribable mass of red pulp at worst, either way they all die. The insane level of violence and gore is astounding, mostly because it’s so goddamn exaggerated and high-blown that I couldn’t take it seriously, yet still seeing the bloody cocktail of dismemberment, disembowelment and decapitation made that dark corner in the bottom of my mind reserved only for the most sickly-sweet things tickle. Ricky embodies the person who won’t just fight the system, but will make a real messy message out of their remains. Literally killing off the system one bastard after the other, he leads all the inmates to freedom.
Despite the aggressive camp nature of the film and the melodramatic violence, the performances from each character were wonderful, within the bounds of the film of course. We’re not talking about performances that move you out of your body and into that unnameable emotional territory where you see the pure untainted humanity of the character, but what it was served the nature of the film perfectly. Fan Siu-wong, leading the charge by playing Ricky gives some surprisingly human moments, tinged with the bizarrely overstated melodrama. I felt his gears screeching as they ground against one another as the trail of bodies the officers and wardens left around grew. While watching the film I switched back and forth between the original Cantonese audio track and the sublimely shit English dubbing. Though the English dub with its ear-aching dialogue and needless dramatism shot the film into new, undiscovered heights of transcendental terribleness, I preferred watching the original dub, just for the sake of sticking to the n native language of the film.
When blood isn’t splattering across the walls and rivers of the stuff flooding across the set, the scenes are shot and composed with a peculiar craftiness which I wholly unexpected from the film. The enclosed spaces of the prison halls and cells made for some brilliant framing of characters, with the unshakable feeling of the panopticon watching on all the inmates like a hawk on crack, the camera further becoming an extension of that central all-seeing eye.
A mix of truly repugnant and bizarre characters and Ricky’s journey of strength and freedom make this a divine watch, not just by virtue of the story and the visceral visuals, but by all the shapes and forms this film combines humour with what is deemed so unacceptably violent in western culture.
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