Hell In A Cell
In 2001, states Riki-Oh/Story of Ricky's narrator, correctional facilities have become franchised businesses, "like parking lots". Into this severely misprophesied future vision of McStorage for criminals comes our title character, Ricky Ho. The conversion of Oh to Ho just confuses me: that's not just bad translation, that's dyslexia. At any rate, with 5 slugs lodged in him - bullet-dodging doesn't exist in this alternate future past - Ricky's been sentenced to hard time for brutally avenging his girlfriend's death at the hands of opium dealers. It'll soon become apparent that brutally is the only way anyone does anything in this film, as the film introduces its antagonists, most notably and inventively named, the Gang of Four. Each rules his own cellblock with an iron fist: the tatooed Oscar, the behemoth Tarzan, the disturbingly fey Rogan, and Brandon, who fights with a huge set of needles and thread. Prisoners subject to martial law by martial artists, no matter how ridiculous they look, doesn't sit well with our hero, and he resolves to fight back against the gang's tyranny. Will Ricky triumph in the face of....aww, skip it. When the hero's name is on the movie and he has nearly half a dozen bullets in him before the credits roll, why even bother being sarcastic about the story's ending?

Shawshanked
Ricky doesn't escape unscathed, though - aside from recieving the standard punches and kicks, he's buried alive, stabbed, electrocuted, covered in cement and sprayed with boiling water. Luckily, Ricky's crazy grandfather who lives in a graveyard taught him the art of chi gung, as part of the strange youth kung-fu outreach program inherent in movies. Aside from being a much better pastime than midnight basketball, chi gung 'feeds off strength, and gets stronger and stronger'. It loses something in its actual translation; 'anything a fighter touches turns into a goofy special effect.' Of course, you'll hardly be concerned with the ending as the story progresses. Within the first ten minutes two grievious facial traumas are suffered, and those are the lighter scenes, as the proceedings could only be self-defense taught by the Gallagher School of Martial Arts. Buckets of syrupy fake blood fly, accompanied by the sound of thunder, were thunder created by a pound of ground beef being thrown against a kettle drum. Heads are crushed, tendons are tied together after being severed, guts and eyes are slapped out, and bodies are generally folded, spindled, and mutilated in what is for all intents and purposes a fireworks show done in flesh. [Fun Fact: For a while, the infamous head-crushing sequence seen to the right was a highlight on the Daily Show in its Craig Kilborne era].

Faces Of Death
Ricky's near-invincibility doesn't make the jailhouse cast cast any less memorable, though. Whether it's the hook-handed porn fiend assistant warden who stores mints in his glass eye or his boss, nearly every main character is landmark. Rogan is a bizarre take on the Secret deoderant slogan: strong enough to be voiced by a man, yet acted by a woman. The head warden, aside from having the fashion sense of Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, carries a gun that fires bullets that make people inflate and explode, along with his obese wombfruit of a son who looks like he ate some of the gun's ammo. Certainly no one would expect any less lunacy from a movie with a psycho sumo named Zorro. And both dubbed and subtitled version provide equal hilarity - listen as prisoners threaten a traitor in their midst, telling the 'son of the bitch' to 'eat shit and lick our shoes clean'.

Oh Ricky, You're So Fine
Whoever the director was, I'd like to thank both him and his drug dealer, for not sparing either of their customers the good stuff. Each scene becomes part of some insane banned video game, with boss battles around a prisoner crucifixion, in rooms with electrified bars, falling ceilings or rapidly filling with cement, with a climax in the prison kitchen near an industrial-size meat grinder. Lest what you've seen sicken or disturb you, imagine the worst special effects you've ever seen if they were done by film school dropouts, then imagine that high school kids tried to copy it. The end result is the best unintentional comedy since Jim Carrey tried to become a serious actor, with all of the violence you wanted to inflict on him present onscreen. With that in mind, it should go without saying that this is no all ages show, or even all people. Every frame of this film could easily be captioned as 'what the fuck?' Yet should you have the temptation to rubberneck at a cinematic trainwreck, you can't do much better than Story of Ricky, assuming you can find it.