[ What’s it about? ] ^ What isn’t it about? According to the opening graphics, in the year 2000, the prison system will be privatized and run by evil businessmen who will use the hell holes as opium farms. A dude named Riki is sentenced to one of these prisons and all hell breaks loose (and that’s an understatement).
[ What did you think? ] ^ Holy cow! Everything that you’ve heard about this thing is true. The violence comes fast and furious and is just as outrageous and over-the-top as Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson ever were.
[ How good and crazy is it? ] ^ Dig: Riki is this karate guy who has five bullets in his chest after trying to avenge the death of his girlfriend who jumped off a roof after seeing some guys shooting heroin in a park. He’s sent to this prison where the assistant warden is corrupt and the general population is ruled by four super-criminals known as the Gang of Four. The gang is made up of a big guy with spikey hair, a muscle guy with a big tattoo, a little guy who throws steel darts on chains, and a pixie of amibiguous gender. Together these guys do some stuff that gets Riki really mad like planing off an old guy’s nose and breaking his little toy train, slicing off the bottom part of a kid’s face, and chaining a dude up to an enormous cross.
Amoung the things that Riki does for revenge: punching a fat guy’s stomach off, punching the top off another guy’s head, popping a guy’s eye out by slapping him in the back of the head, punching someone’s leg off, and punching a guy so hard that the movie flashes to x-ray mode to show you the shattered skull.
And this prison is something else. There are special cells that fill up with cement and others having ceilings which lower in a crushing effect. The assistant warden offers mints which are stored in his glass eye and the warden has a gun which fires bullets that inflate and explode people.
Sounds good, huh? What about this: the warden has the power to transform himself into a 10 foot tall mutant and Riki can sew up his wounds with his own tendons. During a fight with one of the Gang of Four, Riki slices the dude’s stomach open. Wounded, but resourceful, the boss takes out his own intestines and straggles Riki with them. Damn!
And it just keeps going like this. I haven’t even told you about Riki’s survival after being buried for 7 days or his powerful punch which knocks a 15 foot wide hole in a concrete wall.
[ Is it worth checking out? ] ^ What do you think? You should have been running to the video store before you got to this sentence. “Story of Riki” has been nearly impossible to find for the past couple of years, however it has been recently re-released on VHS and DVD. Go now!
You made a mistake. Riki didn’t cut Oscar’s stomach open. Oscar did it to himself, and pulled out his own intestines when Riki came close. Yes, it makes less sense.