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If you don't already know, Story of Ricky is a Hong Kong-Japanese co-production, based on a hyper-violent manga of the same name. Those of you familiar with comics like Fist of the North Star and Violence Jack have an idea of what I mean by hyper- violence; the autuers of these strips have an astoundingly grotesque imagination when it comes to creative, explosive means of death. Bad guys get to do really bad guy things, then die a hideous death.
 First, we see a bit of text onscreen informing us that it is the far-flung year 2000, and all prisons have been privatized (In fact, in the Tokyo Shock tape I'm reviewing, we get told this twice, at the very beginning). Into such a prison comes our hero, Ricky, a man who is still carrying around five bullets in his chest as souvenirs.
As we all know, anything run by Big Business becomes irretrievably corrupt, and this prison is no exception. Guards are largely absent - what order there is inside being kept by four murderous convicts called the Gang of Four, with each running a separate wing of the prison. Our first inkling of what it's like on the inside occurs when (I don't remember his name so I'll call him Juniper), a major bully with an entourage of two, smashes the wooden toy locomotive a white collar criminal was making for his son. The salaryman tries to jump Juniper with a wood lathe, but instead winds up with a strip lathed from his nose. Chuckling, Juniper saunters away... only to have Ricky trip him, so he does a header, face down, on the exposed nails of the smashed engine (OUCH!).
 This would be excruciating viewing were the shot of Juniper's head impaling itself upon the bed of nails not such an obvious dummy - that, and we are led to believe that he quite naturally put up his hand to ward off the nails... and so winds up with his hand nailed to his face for the remainder of the scene.
Vowing revenge, Juniper enlists the aid of 500 pound homicidal maniac Zorro, whose job it is to kill Ricky and then eat him. Ricky responds to this by punching through Zorro (that is some kung fu), causing the fat felon to take a slow motion fall, guts spilling from his abdomen and blood flying everywhere (again, in slow motion... odd how his wound here looks nothing like the wound Ricky inflicted in the close-up...). Ricky then takes a spike through the hand from Juniper and, for an encore, punches through him also. This eventually brings Ricky into conflict with Gang of Four member Oscar, who slashes Ricky's arm badly during their fight. Ricky responds by digging into his wrecked arm, knotting the sinews back together, and then proceeding to beat the hell out of Oscar. The bad guy, not about to be outdone, so he ripped out his own intestines to strangle Ricky! WTF!!!!!
 Wait, there's more! Ricky throws Oscar into the air, and when he deals Oscar the fatal blow, we get to see it in X-Ray! Emboldened by Ricky's victory, the inmates descend on the evil Assistant Warden (who has a claw for one hand and a glass eye that dispenses mints), only to have the rest of the Gang of Four show up to deal out some serious hurtin'.
Here is where what is perceived as Story of Ricky's major selling point: if you watched Comedy Central's The Daily Show in the Craig Kilborn days, the host would always close his celebrity interview with a segment called "Five Questions", which was introduced by a scene of a huge man making a mannequin's head explode betwixt his clapping hands. That scene is from Story of Ricky, and it is Gangster of Four Tarzan's way of stopping the convicts cold (it is a rather hard act to follow). The other Gangsters include a New Wave guy who throws knitting needles attached to elastic bands, and what is supposed to be a pretty boy who jumps out of drains.
 Ahem. Where was I? Oh, yes. Ricky's kung fu. Damn, he's good! But that's not all - Ricky also has superhuman strength. We are informed of this during a flashback when Ricky's uncle asks him, "So, Ricky... do you still have superhuman strength?" Ricky is serving time for the first time he used his skills in anger, killing the drug dealer responsible for the death of his girlfriend. So it is small wonder that, when Ricky discovers that the entire west wing of the prison is being used to grow opium poppies, he goes nutzoid again and burns the entire crop.
Now all the bad guys are pissed at Ricky, including the recently returned Warden, who packs a gun which, for some reason, makes people inflate like balloons and explode. And oh, yeah, he knows Ricky's form of kung fu, too. Only when he uses it, he grows into a seven foot tall monster, with a real mucus problem.
 You may think I've told you a lot of what goes on in Ricky. I assure you, I have not - just when you think this movie has run out of ways to do violence to the human form, it surprises you all over again. Yet it somehow, oddly, manages to avoid being totally mean-spirited; unlike the catalog of atrocities in say, your average Italian chunk-blower, the stuff on display in Ricky is more like the exuberant grossness of a 13 year-old who has been drawing his own comic books and suddenly discovers the magic of a red marker. This gleeful gratuity totally befits the movie's comic book origins - Ricky will be battered, cut, torn and bleeding from a fight in one scene, and appear miraculously whole and unscarred in the very next scene. He even regenerates like Wile E. Coyote.
 Although I wouldn't classify Story of Ricky as a comedy, the movies it immediately invokes as comrades are gore comedies, like Evil Dead II and Dead Alive.The upshot of all this? Story of Ricky comes highly recommended, but use as directed. Display at beer-swilling Guy Meetings. Do not expect to pop it in on a quiet evening on the couch and have your lady love appreciate it's gooey wonders over a glass of Chablis. But If she does... wow...
MY Score : (out of a possible ten)
9
RAVEN-SYMONE'S Score : (out of a possible ten)
2
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