THE STORY OF RICKY (a.k.a., RIKI-OH) (Hong Kong, 1992)



Directed by: Nam Nai-choi
Starring: Fan Siu-wong, Fan Mui-sang, William Ho, Yukari Oshima, Frankie
Chin, Gloria Yip
90 minutes, 35mm, dubbed in English

It is not news that the prison system is a concrete jungle of injustice, overflowing with wrongly-convicted innocents and sexual predators gratifying their sick kicks while guards bribed with dirty money look the other way. A grey hell where human life is 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 and you will turn a blind eye, but for those whose minds thirst for justice and 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 and extreme violence is the order of the day. The harvesting of poppies in the West Cell Block, an outbreak of flaying as a way to settle personal grievances - these are just some of the problems that face young Ricky. 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 in two. But the inhumanity of the prison system is starkly underlined in THE STORY OF RICKY when we see giants using the "Open Coconut" blow to explode heads, and prisoners encased in concrete, clearly violating their civil rights.

A sort of penal limbo, where convicts are turned into unconvincing actors in black pajamas and doomed to serve their sentences on anonymous, flimsy sets, this prison aims to "reform" its population by having them congregate randomly and perform badly dubbed crowd scenes, when not skulking down overly-lit hallways or taking showers. The assistant warden is in charge and he rules the prison with one good hand, one prosthetic hook, and a glass eye full of breath mints. Many of us will see him as the villain, but the system is really to blame, and it is represented by the Head Warden. With his flouncy pirate shirts you know he's trouble, but the true problem is revealed later, raising 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. Two-bit actors attack their two-dimensional 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. The androgynous member of the hideous Gang of Four, 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. It is as wholesome and nourishing for your soul as it is educational and nutritional for your brain. Completely irresponsible, and liable to cause panic attacks in those with a sense of right and wrong, 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.