Just Like Oz, But With More Asians & Less Rape

Due to Gmail’s one weak spot of user unfriendliness, I accidentally deleted my original draft of Riki Oh: The Story of Riki. As all you writers out there know, losing a few paragraphs is more than disheartening. It can kill that spark of inspiration, making you wonder if it’s worth going on when so much passion has already been wasted.

Then I thought about the scene where a character seemingly commits hari-kari, then calls his opponent over so that he can try to strangle the victor with his own now-hanging-out intestines, prompting a cheeky villain on the sidelines to comment “He’s got a lot of guts!” and it dawned on me that NOT sharing this film with you readers would be a crime worthy of being choked to death by someone’s entrails.

Quick Plot: In the future of 2001 (just go with it), prison facilities have become privatized and are now handled by greedy corporations, prompting plenty of corruption and in-house crime. Enter Riki Oh, a young man who sets metal detectors on fire because he’s so badass, he never had five bullets removed from his chest. Riki was a former student of some Jedi-like martial art practice, rendering him invincible and awesome. Ain’t no crooked assistant warden’s glass eye and hook hand gonna beat THAT!

But oh, how glorious it is to see him and his minions try! Remember how awesome Punisher: War Zone was for featuring multiple punch-through-facings? Riki Oh makes that movie look like My Little Pony, and sure, now I’m having a strange craving to see a reimagined My Little Pony with face punchings and Dominic West, but that’s beside the point, the point being Riki Oh is amazing.

We’re talking having a character sew up his wound with his very own dangling skin. We’re talking screaming alone in a rainy prison yard as if The Shawshank Redemption could hear ten years into the future. We’ve got wacky dubbing that lets extras sound like low level New Yawkahs in a ‘40s gangster movie and multiple villains with extreme haircuts. As if that weren’t enough, as if we lowly viewers even DESERVED anything more, there is an outstanding use of a terrible dummy on display at the 2/3rds mark.

I loved this movie. I love everyone involved in making this exist, I love LOVE love everyone and anyone who had any place in seeing that this film got seen by me, from the boys at VCinema for recommending it eons ago to the Netflix employee who sealed the envelope and dropped it in the mail for my beloved postal representative to deliver to my apartment. This is a ridiculous film, one filled from top to bottom with organs being torn out of oversized bodies, men turning into gobbly giants, and heroes poking out villains’ eyes to immediately toss aside for the fastest moving vultures to swoop in and feast upon.

This movie is pure glory.

High Points

The part where it started

Low Points

The part where it ended

Lessons Learned

Human beings can be very breakable

The going rate for commissioning a kill inside prison walls in 2001? 30 pounds of rice

There is nothing that can’t be punched through, be it cement or human stomachs

Rent/Bury/Buy

Here’s a film screaming for a deluxe special edition Blu Ray—nay, here’s a film PUNCHING YOU THROUGH YOUR MOHAWKED FACE for a deluxe special edition Blu Ray. Watching Riki Oh: The Story of Riki was easily one of the most fun-filled viewing experiences I’ve had in some time, and by golly, I would be a terrible person if I didn’t convince you to do the same. Blind buy it, and if that means selling your VHS porn collection (on display in the warden’s office, no less) in order to do so, then that’s the price you pay.