3.5 out of 5
Riki-Oh is probably most famous for a short clip of a man clapping his hands into another man's head and causing it to explode - it's a clip that was used when Craig Kilborn was running The Daily Show all those years back. Really, that's a pretty fair clip to sum up Riki-Oh, given that the whole movie is every bit as absurdly violent, incredibly unrealistic, kind of silly, and pretty entertaining as that clip is. The plot, such as it is, involves a man jailed in a futuristic prison where inmates are treated like cattle (in more ways than one) and his effort to right the wrongs he sees in that corrupt world. Over the course of the movie, that involves everything from causing people to explode to being attacked by a man wielding his own intestines to a lot of surprisingly easy dismemberment. Riki-Oh certainly isn't "good" in any traditional sense of the word; it doesn't really make any damn sense, it's pretty goofy throughout, and the blood and gore is more absurd than ever effective. But none of that means that it's not really entertaining in a completely insane way, as the movie figures out how to keep topping itself and coming up with more and more insane violence and action. Watching it during the day by myself, I had a lot of fun, but I think if I watched it at midnight with a couple of drinks and some friends, I would have loved it. It's certainly something, and an entertaining something, at that. (The fact that I recorded this off of Turner Classic Movies, even if it was during their Underground lineup, is kind of a source of bizarre joy to me - I'm always amused by the thought of someone falling asleep during TCM's daily lineup and waking up as a man rips out his own intestines and uses them as nunchucks against someone else.)
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
