5 gibbles out of 5

Director: Ngai Kai Lam

Man, I hate doing this.  I hate actually liking cult movies.  But while you and I have both seen movies like Riki-Oh, or perhaps even influenced by it, the actual tone – which is moderately dark, for what it is – combined with the steady state insanity, makes for a movie I wasn’t fully expecting and ended up being impressed by.

You know this one, right?  I came by it… or rather, have wanted to see it… since The Daily Show’s premier on Comedy Central.  As you probably know, because you know everything and are super cool and I wish I were you, the original introductory sequence had a clip from soemthing where a guy’s head was being punched off.  Some internet research told me that this was from the movie ‘Riki-Oh.’  Of course, at this point I wasn’t all into head-punching-off movies, so I just laughed and laughed and remembered the reference but otherwise forgot all about it.  (There was also a Re-Animator clip in there.)

Years pass, and I’m into head-punching-off movies at this point, and I stumble across the box for ‘Riki-Oh’ at the video store where I worked.  I added it to my “oh right I need to watch this” queue and then promptly got distracted by reading the bible and also watching hardcore midget pornography.  Some more years pass, and I’ve read all the bibles and watched all the hardcore midget pornography, so now I’m ready for Riki.  Alas, video stores don’t exist anymore, and Netflix only allowed me to “save” it to my queue.

Glory of glories when it finally arrived some days ago.

What to say that actually needs saying?  Riki is imprisoned.  He has five bullets lodged in his chest (with wounds we can’t see…) and a murky past.  He hates injustice.  Damn he hates it, so much that when he sees it, he’s liable to punch a hole through someone.  Because Ricky has learned the art of Qigong, ya see, and it allows one to focus their strength… for head-punching-off.  Which there’s plenty of.  The movie is a cult classic for a reason, and the well-paced gore is that reason.

Your movies that touch on this style from the same era – Evil Dead, Dead Alive – are both well-done and cult classics in their own right, but Evil Dead has camp running through it and Dead Alive has ridiculous running through it.  Riki, for all of its bombast, reminded me tonally of Re-Animator, which is my favorite horror movie.  Re-Animator has comedy, and certainly doesn’t avoid hamming it up, but there’s a dark, consistent tone to it that’s concerned with telling a story.  It’s more of a movie than Evil Dead or Dead Alive (I love Evil Dead and enjoy Dead Alive, so no insult intended to those films), and… yes, watch through the cheesy splatter carefully, but the way that Riki holds onto its reasoning and tries to wend in an actual story to the mess sets it apart from its ilk.  The Netflix summary makes it seem like all of this information will be presented up front, but instead the film waits to tell us why Riki is in prison, and even then it’s shown in flashbacks, not directly told to us.  Beneath the splatter and kook, there’s an odd, subtle attempt to tell a story here.

Am I saying the story is genius?  That the acting is amazing, or that the effects aren’t silly?  No, of course not.  But the combination is really something unique and gives the film more substance than head explosions, which highlights the absurdity of the atmosphere, which makes it that much more enjoyable to watch.  Just don’t get me wrong – it is, on the whole, what you want and expect if you’re after a cult movie.  Damn those cult films.  In the massively over-clogged world of film, though, it’s always a joy when you see something that asserts itself just a little bit differently than the rest.

You can see the subtle aspects to which I refer.