"Story Of Ricky" is almost impossible to properly review, because it's the sort of movie that makes you want to tell every last thing about it in full detail to everyone you ever run into. I'm going to try SO hard to resist that urge here.

On the one hand, it's a truly awful film. The acting is bad, the special effects will leave you dumbfounded with their ineptitude, the dialogue is so pathetic that it almost skyrockets beyond kung-fu movie standards and winds up not even being unintentionally funny (*almost* - but don't get me wrong, it's still pretty funny by itself), the actual kung-fu action is pretty lame (all the more so, considering the stunts were directed by Philip Kwok of The Venoms fame)... basically, there's only one element of the movie that you can't criticize, and that is the fact that the cameras are always in focus.

So it goes without question that "Story Of Ricky" is transcendently funny and brilliant and easily one of the greatest bits of cinema you will ever see, and as such I urge you to run to the nearest store and pick up a copy post-haste. No, not as a rental. Trust me. Buy the thing. It's an instant party creator. Just call friends up and say you've got the movie. Those who know what it's about will be unable to resist the lure to watch it yet once again. Those who don't know, just promise them that their mind will be blown. (Or as I like to put it, "it'll kick your a**, then it'll graft a new a** onto your old one so as to kick it too".) Once they see it, they, too, will become instant "Story Of Ricky" converts. If I had a numerical way of measuring such a thing, I'd say that it improved my social life by 2,000% percent, simply because people keep wanting to stop by just to watch it again. I'm NOT joking. I frankly don't know a single person who doesn't absolutely love this movie on at least one level.

Well, there's one possible exception - my old pastor. Not that I know for certain, but I'm going to play the odds and assume that he wouldn't dig this at all. You see, the number one selling point of "Story Of Ricky" is gore. Lots of gore that gets about as graphic as gore is likely to ever get. Unlike "Dead Alive", which simply relied on giving you gore, gore, and more gore to entertain you, and unlike "Army Of Darkness", which relied on the hilarious schtick of Bruce Campbell in addition to the ungodly heaps of gore, "Story Of Ricky" takes a fairly sizeable, but not quite as ridiculous, amount of gore. The beauty of "Story Of Ricky" is that it somehow, some way, makes all of it amazingly funny.

(Frankly, you know you've got a winner on your hands when one of the selling points listed on the front of the DVD case is "Includes the hilarious exploding head scene as featured on Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show'!")

That's not to say that you won't get quite a few snickers out of the laughably bad plot. Ricky Ho (played by - hell, who knows who is starring as who and who cares) is a preposterously muscular hulking martial arts badass who is sent to prison for manslaughter. You see, he's got a temper-control problem, and once he found out that Triad members were responsible for the (honestly flat out f***ing hilarious) death of his girlfriend, he tracked down - well, he didn't track down the Triad members directly responsible, but went for a Triad pimp instead. Then he kills him. Since this is one of the less shocking deaths in the movie I guess I can reveal how - he punches the guy in the head. You're treated to a pleasant close-up of the guy's head, complete with this nasty fist-shaped-indentation in it that sort of resembles a moon crater, albeit with more blood. Again, that's easily the mildest death in the movie.

(In case you were wondering, the exploding head is probably the third or fourth ugliest death in the film. No, not THE ugliest. It ranks sort of high.)

Whoops, back to the plot. So anyway, Ricky's sent to prison. Through a series of flashbacks you are drawn into the sensitive, spiritual side of Ricky, as he enjoys a sickeningly cute date with the girlfriend in one, and is taught his special style of kung-fu in another. Oh yeah, THAT scene is special. Chi Kun kung-fu is basically the concept of "strength feeds upon strength and gets stronger". I think. The subtitles said "strong against weak, weak against strong". I have a feeling that the people who translated the original dialogue to English subtitles are not the same people who translated it into the English dubbed dialogue, because if you play the movie with English voices and English subtitles, you will almost never see the subtitle agreeing with what your ears are hearing. Anyway, back to Chi Kun. Ricky goes to a graveyard and kneels at a grave that has no significant marking on it whatsoever. Let's just say it's his mother's or something. His uncle shows up, apropos of nothing, and asks him if he still has his inhuman strength. Ricky says yes, but after demonstrating a bit he gets schooled by one hard forearm swipe of his even more ridiculously strong uncle. Then there's a quick little (hilarilously, blatantly homoerotic) interlude where he asks his uncle to teach him Chi Kun. Then the uncle throws the tombstones of various graves at him. Yes, he rips tombstones out of the ground and throws them at Ricky, who proceeds to smash them into bits. Classy stuff. Anyway, that's how Ricky gained the power to punch pimp's heads so hard that he leaves indentations in their head.

Oh yeah, and Ricky is really good at using leaves as makeshift whistles/flutes. That's how he befriends the godson of one of the many fellow prisoners that he brutally kills - he tries to teach the poor fellow how to blow on the leaf, but since the guy's tongue was ripped out, Ricky procures an accordion out of thin air and gives it to him. The godson is overjoyed. Soon the godson's skin is completely flayed from his body and his rotting corpse is left in a courtyard for the prisoners to find later, which elicits a few fantastic "NOOOOOOOOoooooOOOOOOOoooooooooo!!!!!"s from Ricky. I think this was an attempt to illustrate Ricky's struggle to balance the few hours of the day where he's punching right through people's abdomens or snapping their legs in half (not breaking the bone, mind you, I mean literally snapping one in half like a log of wood) with his deep, profound appreciation for the more beautiful, artistic things in life.

If none of this is making sense, then it's because - trust me, I've watched the movie about a million times now - none of this makes sense.

Anyway, we've now established that Ricky may be a hot-headed muscle-bound kung-fu freak, but he's very sensitive and has a strong sense of right and wrong. That gets him in trouble in this prison, as he quickly runs afoul of The Gang Of Four, a group of kung-fu experts who rule the prison through intimidation, and help tend to the warden's opium garden. The warden is on vacation at the beginning, so he's left things in the hands of the assistant warden, and if there's ANY damn justice in this world, The Assistant Warden of "Story Of Ricky" is destined to be the most talked-about, memorable, and beloved character in all of cinematic history. Never mind that his office is strewn with nothing but porno movies... no no no, that's nothing. I won't dare spoil the sight gag involving his false eye, but trust me, it'll leave you downright stupefied. Then it'll leave you gasping for air, trying not to literally die from laughter. I'm NOT over-exaggerating here. And anyway, to pretend that the plot matters would be missing the point entirely, so I'll just spoil things by saying that the hero wins in the long run by slaughtering everyone, then breaking down the prison walls to make his escape, which he probably could have done a long time ago in a universe where things were supposed to make even the littlest bit of sense.

I suspect that the authors of either the movie or the manga comic that the movie is based on are also trying to say something about the evils of privatizing prisons. Like that matters. Let's skip to the REALLY important stuff: the gore.

Most of the battles revolve around Ricky taking out The Gang Of Four. Now these battles are pretty weak if you're trying to approach this movie as a kung-fu flick (which you might be tempted to do once you find out that Philip Kwok choreographed the stunts and fight scenes). So don't make that mistake. Instead, ask yourself, how much cooler would (insert any random movie here) be if it had a scene where one guy cut his stomach open, seppuku-style, then ripped out his own intestines and attempted to strangle the protagonist with them? Of course, the answer is "infinitely cooler". And that's AFTER the guy's right eye is popped right out of its socket thanks to a skillfully-placed backhand slap to the back of the head by Ricky. And that's AFTER Ricky had the tendons in his left arm severed by the other guy's knife - although of course that doesn't deter Ricky a bit since he simply ties his tendons back together shoelace-style.

And that's AFTER you've already seen a whole bunch of other crazy-a**ed stuff that'll simply reduce you to profanity. Well, whatever profanity you can squeeze in between frequent fits of hysterical laughter. Exploding heads, exploding bodies, meat grinders, severed noses, eyes impaled on nails, people being force-fed razor blades, LOTS of exploding abdomens, punches causing peoples' skulls to split in half - it's all here. It's presented in hysterically poor fashion (you can oh so clearly tell when they're using latex dolls in lieu of actual people).

Oh man, I just revealed about 99% of the movie right there. Well, it's not like it matters. I promise you that what you'll see in this movie simply does not translate into mere words properly. I couldn't do this gorefest justice no matter how hard I tried. All of the above combines to create something that somehow manages to be every bit as gloriously memorable as "Dead Alive" or "Army Of Darkness", even if the gore is lacking a bit in quantity. Now there are absolutely no redeeming features to be found here, unless you really want to stretch things by saying Ricky's burning of the opium garden is a good anti-drug message for kids - so this isn't a movie for Family Night. But sweet Jesus, it works so perfectly in just about any other context. If you at ALL have an appreciation for the entertainment value of horrible stuff (come on, I know you laugh at Eminem's lyrics at times), then just get "Story Of Ricky" right now and begin your new life.


SPECIAL DVD FEATURES

* The original theatrical trailer - eh, this isn't worth too much, but you do get to see bits and pieces of the manga comic that inspired the film.
* Cast & crew Biographies/Filmographies - again, not too useful since most of the other movies these guys have starred in are pretty poor even to the point of just being boring, and the one actor who IS worth checking out (Philip Kwok, a.k.a. Kuo Chui of The Venoms, who starred in some of the best kung-fu movies of all time) isn't detailed at all here. Tragedy!
* Synopsis (bilingual) - meh. No need for this, since the plot is just about described in its entirety on the back of the DVD case.
* More Attractions - oh yeah, here we go. You get some REALLY cool clips from movies like "Last Hurrah For Chivalry" (which apparently was directed by John Woo, and stars both Jackie Chan AND Wei Pei, who was another member of The Venoms), "Duel To The Death" (a miscellaneous, but very over-the-top-looking wire-fu flick), "The Magnificent Butcher" (for a fattie, this dude has MADD a**-kicking skills), and finally some Oriental Rambo-wanna-be flick who's name I can't begin to figure out, but boy does it look great.
* Language/subtitle otions - you can hear it in English, Cantonese or Mandarin, and you can read it in English, "Traditional" Chinese or "Simplified" Chinese. As I mentioned above, don't expect the subtitles to agree with the dialogue.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age