Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991)

There's a moment in Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky where a man punches a dog to death. Just, straight up, punches a dog to death. And that tells you everything you need to know about whether this film is for you.

I'll be straight with you: this is not a good film. The plot barely holds together, the acting is somewhere between wooden and baffling, and the logic of the world it takes place in seems to change scene to scene based purely on whatever would allow for the next ridiculous act of carnage. By any conventional measure, this is a mess. And yet. And yet I had an absolute blast watching it.

This is the purest "so bad it's good" experience I've had in a long time. There's a category of film that transcends its own awfulness by committing so completely, so gleefully, to the chaos it's serving up that you stop caring about craft and just surrender to the spectacle. Riki-Oh is absolutely that film. It earns its reputation. I've seen plenty of films try to be this kind of wild and fall flat because there's no genuine conviction behind the madness. This one has conviction in spades. Every bone-shattering punch, every eruption of cartoonish gore, every inexplicable villain turn feels like the filmmakers looked at each other and said "yes, more of that, keep going."

The violence deserves its own paragraph because it is genuinely, jaw-droppingly absurd. We're talking about the kind of practical gore effects that look ridiculous and brilliant in equal measure. Heads crushed, bodies folded in ways bodies shouldn't fold, internal organs treated as set dressing. It's over the top in a way that The Raid 2 absolutely is not, and that distinction matters. The Raid 2 is a masterwork of action choreography played completely straight. Riki-Oh is something else entirely. It's action filmmaking with the dial turned past eleven and then snapped clean off. Where serious action films make you wince, this one makes you burst out laughing and then immediately feel slightly strange about yourself for doing so.

And then there's the random monster thing. I won't get into specifics because genuinely you need to encounter it yourself, but there is a point in this film where a human being transforms into something that could generously be described as a creature, and the film treats it with the same matter-of-fact energy as everything else. No big deal. Man becomes monster. Moving on. That commitment to not blinking, no matter how wild things get, is honestly kind of admirable.

Does any of it make sense? No. Is the hero a compelling or well-drawn character? Not really. Is there anything approaching tension or emotional weight? Almost none. But here's the thing about a film like this: you're not there for any of that. You're there because someone told you about the dog punching, or the gore, or the monster thing, and you needed to see it with your own eyes. And on those terms, Riki-Oh delivers completely. It promises insanity and it keeps the promise, start to finish.

I thought about the Hong Kong action films I've seen that do similar things with different intentions. I reviewed A Better Tomorrow not long ago and that's a film operating at a completely different register, stylish and emotionally grounded in ways Riki-Oh has no interest in. There's room for both. The genre is wide enough to hold films that want to break your heart and films that just want to break everything else.

Three stars. Which might sound generous for a film I've described as bad. But the star rating isn't purely for quality, it's for the experience, and the experience here is a genuine good time. Watch it with a group, watch it loud, and embrace the fact that you're about to see a man punch a dog to death and feel weirdly fine about it.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1991  | Watched: 2025-04-19

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More from Hong Kong: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Hand of Death (1976) · Come Drink with Me (1966) · Street Fighter (1994)
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More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)