The Story of Ricky (1991, Ngai Kai Lam)

Just to clarify something straight away - how you deal with Story of Ricky greatly depends on where your limits are set. Just for the sake of argument, I'm gonna assume that you guys have high limits. I'd hate to think I was recommending this flick to a bunch of RomCom fans.

Dear Lord, though, Story of Ricky is a treat. Insanely violent and utterly daft, it's huge amounts of fun providing that you take it in the right spirit. This is the sort of flick where attempting to strangle someone with your own intestines is considered a legitimate fighting technique. Where a dog gets unconvincingly kicked in half for no particular reason. Where false eyeballs are a perfectly logical place to store breath mints.

If you're looking for plot, you're in very much the wrong place. Wrong town, wrong planet. Ricky's in prison and Ricky kicks arse. That's largely it.

Oh, okay, there's a bit more to it than that. There's a subplot about prison officials growing opium in the west wing. There's a wafer-thin snippet of stuff about Ricky's lost love, (the only female to appear onscreen: she wisely dives off a large building within minutes, presumably to avoid being kicked in half or strangled with intestines). Pretty much, though, the flick just shifts from one overblown fight scene to the next. The air of almost whimsical insanity is greatly boosted by the bizarro subtitles, which appear to have been written by someone who learnt English from 1970s episodes of Grange Hill. Extreme violence is greeted by cheerful shouts of "You're the tops, Ricky!" and "Ricky's the best!"

The movie plays very much like a moving comic book, which is fair enough as it's an adaptation. As I said at the beginning, it's all a matter of where your levels are set. If you enjoyed Bad Taste then Story of Ricky is likely to be very much your cup of suspicious liquid. If you thought that Bad Boys II was too violent, then you'd better start covering your eyes now.