On demand: "Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky"

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is how the worker ants at Hong Kong genre specialists Paragon Films saw 2001 from the perspective of 1991: as a dystopia of privatised prisons (not too far off, then) where if the effete lags calling themselves the Gang of Four don't get you, the brutal screws and corrupt warden surely will. Our hero Ricky (Louis Fan, in his days as Fan Siu-wong) is a long-haired antiauthoritarian with a killer stare, rock-hard abs and a burning sense of injustice, plus - and this is crucial, given the cruel and unusual punishment he and his fellow inmates are facing - the rare ability to punch clean through those who would oppose him in eruptive gouts of gore. Anyone whose brain refuses to slip into neutral when faced with such entertainments may begin to ponder whether Riki-Oh could only have been arrived at in a colony that has known more than its fair share of oppressions in its time - and wonder whether fists that punch through flesh and bone might also provide a chance to punch through the bricks and mortar of institutions. That superpower is, however, deployed altogether selectively here. The movie's primary purpose is exploitation: what it finally suggests is if The Shawshank Redemption had been produced by Roger Corman twenty years earlier, immediately after the success of Death Wish and Caged Heat.

The film's limitations are as obvious as any bop on the nose. It was shot for tuppence-ha'penny (or local equivalent) on a handful of easily redressed, easy-to-hose-down sets: in the prison washroom, the urinals and showers are too close for comfort, while the staircases are the wobbliest since TV's Crossroads. The overemphatic American dubbing of the international release print makes it hard to take wholly seriously, because a film where a punched head explodes like a watermelon really doesn't need further emphasis. Tune all that out, however, and your bounteous reward is a pacy run of ever more inventive and energetic scenes: a cemetery flashback where an uncle trains Ricky by hurling gravestones in his general direction (bit disrespectful to the dead, but a useful marker that anything goes here); a hook-handed deputy warden, occupying an office where the sole bookcase is apparently filled with VHS porno, chugging the water from the receptacle his glass eye is soaking in; Ricky performing midfight surgery on himself, shortly before his foe commits seppuku and uses his own intestines to try and strangle our boy. Evidently, little of it was meant for the Ladies in Lavender crowd, but your inner 15-year-old cannot help but thrill to the accumulation of cool, freaky and/or lurid shit. One reason for Riki-Oh's semi-occasional revivals - in repertory, on DVD, and now on streaming - is that it is in its own way as oppositional as Ricky himself, its every baroque turn showing up the listlessness and imaginative shortfalls of both the lumpen van Damme/Lundgren thumpers the studios were peddling at the time, and the superhero movies that followed in its wake. Even on a shoestring budget, it says, all this is possible in the cinema - and yet the movies have persistently settled for that instead. Which is the real dystopia? You be the judge.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is currently streaming via Prime Video, and available to rent via YouTube.