Violence! Gore! Blood, blood, blood! That�s Riki-Oh: The Story Of Ricky in a nutshell, although it should be titled Bad Ass: The Story Of The Biggest Baddest Motherfucka Since The Big Bang.
With indefinable strength and extraordinary healing powers, Bad Ass (I refuse to call him either Riki or Ricky) once was a happy-go-lucky martial arts student in love, until his girlfriend jumps off a roof to escape being raped. Having killed the would-be rapist, Bad Ass winds up in a prison so inescapable that none of the cell doors ever seem to lock, allowing the black-clad prisoners to roam around freely. The penal complex is dominated by gangs of thugs who torture, trounce and generally terrorize the general population of prisoners under the auspices of the evil warden. But Bad Ass assumes the plight of the weak and uses his omnipotent strength to scare the bejeezus out of the bad guys. With his bare hands, Bad Ass can punch through stomachs, karate-chop off limbs, and knock the brain out of your head.
Nothing can stop Bad Ass, not even if you perform hari kiri and use your large intestine to strangle him. If you shove shards of glass in his mouth, he�ll spit them back in your face. If you slice open his arm, he�ll tie the tendons back together. If you bury him alive six feet under and leave him there for a week, he�ll still keep on coming. Nothing can stop Bad Ass. Nothing.
But Bad Ass has a soft side as well, shown in agonizing flashbacks of him laughing uncontrollably with his dead girlfriend. In another flashback, his master desecrates a graveyard by pulling out headstones and throwing them at Bad Ass, who can shatter them simply by turning around and letting them hit his back.
Plot? Oh yeah, after Bad Ass defeats enemy after enemy and burns the warden�s opium hoard, the warden transforms into a hulking behemoth of a man for the ultimate fight. It ends quickly, however, once Bad Ass tosses the warden into a vast meat grinder, saturating our hero in blood. He then punches a three-story-tall hole in the prison wall and announces to the prisoners that they�re free, although Bad Ass is the only one who walks through the hole.
A kind of live-action anime, Riki-Oh is one of those timeless odes to the cinema that makes us want to stand up and shout to the emperor to throw more innocent Christians to the lions.
