One of the most absurdly violent films ever made, this outrageous comic book of a movie is short on style but makes up for it in sheer audacity and excess. Brooding street kid Ricky Ho (Fan Siu Wang, playing the part of avenging angel with self-righteous earnestness) walks into the corrupt corporate prison system with superpowered martial arts skills and proceeds to punch his way through every bullying thug and sadistic guard who comes his way. Literally. His fist puts a gaping hole through the stomach of a giant sumo-wrestler-sized thug and the jaw of a pompadoured bully, and turns the skull of a pathetic guard into a bloody stump. As Ricky becomes a hero to the downtrodden prisoners, the assistant warden (who keeps breath mints in his removable glass eye) organizes the dreaded "gang of four," the cell block gang leaders, to take Ricky down. Fat chance! There's nothing realistic about the bone-shattering, blood-splattering spectacle of crushed heads and snapped limbs, but the unrestrained display becomes so preposterously grotesque it hardly matters. You'll be convinced that the "Oh" in Riki-Oh stands for "Oh my God, did I really see that?" Yes, Ricky really does tie a sliced tendon with his teeth, a thug cuts open his gut and uses his own intestines to strangle Ricky, and the warden (for no apparent reason) puffs himself up into a giant rubber ogre. Ricky's curvy, feminine nemesis Rogan is played by Yukari Oshima, the butt-kicking, all-woman star of Angel and others. --Sean Axmaker
