Story of Ricky and the gonzo reality of dystopia

Lam Na Choi must have been stunned by how right he got it

Take your pick

If you’ve never seen Story of Ricky, you really owe it to yourself to do something about that. A Hong Kong/Japan co-production (two great tastes that taste great together!) from 1991, it rides with a vibe that acts like it can’t believe that no one was taking proper advantage of the whole Category III rating system enacted in Hong Kong only a few years prior. In 1988, TF Mou released a picture so egregious, a picture considered extreme even by contemporary standards that the governing bodies of the Hong Kong government felt like they needed to step in and take measures to ensure that everybody knew what they were getting into when they bought a ticket to see Men Behind The Sun. But then following the establishment of the Category III rating, no one seemed to be actually making movies worthy of the classification. Everyone seemed to nab the category entirely by accident by making a movie about the Tongs or deliberately only by casting Amy Yip but not one of them ever came close to touching the unspeakable atrocities of Mou’s outrageous anti-Japan propaganda piece.

Along came Lam Na Choi to fix that.

Just prior to the release of Story of Ricky, Lam tasted success with the Hong Kong-produced manga adaptation, Saga of the Phoenix, and then decided to lean-the-fuck-in to the Category III rating with another manga adaptation, this time taking on the notoriously violent seinen (manga intended for adult dudes) serial, Riki-Oh. Having read the first couple volumes of the manga, Lam’s adaptation is remarkably faithful, changing only very minor story details while staying zealously faithful to manga’s profoundly violent fight scenes down to page-to-frame renderings of the ridiculous action.

Riki-Oh/Story of Ricky x-ray head punch comparison

Story of Ricky imagines a fairly stock-standard near future dystopia, lifting backstory from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, where environmental ruin and unchecked capitalism have wreaked havoc on society at large, resulting in widespread civil unrest, unprecedented unemployment, and a steep rise in the national crime rate. Among the hyper-capitalist developments, a certain fact is rolled out to the viewership as evidence that things in this world have gone terribly, unspeakably sideways.

Prisons have become private enterprises.

Shocking, I know.

In 1988 Japan, when the original manga was published, the entire concept of privatized prisons was dished out to ravenous consumers of manga as a gonzo concept, possible only within the margins of this ridiculous comic book about a man so strong he smashes holes in the people he fights with his bare hands. The prescience of this movie is staggering at times since it doesn’t end just there.

Before Story of Ricky was available widely in western markets, it existed on the bootleg circuit in un-subtitled versions. It may be hard to imagine such a barrier to western fans of eastern movies these days since everything is available to everyone all the god damn time now, but unless the movie’s lead was a Hong Kong actor approaching the renown of Bruce Lee, English subtitles were hard to come by. Even more so in the notoriously isolationist world of Japanese film distribution that only occasionally deigned to grace American shores with Japanese IP. The surprising mid-90’s successes of Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat eased those tensions, and the ravenous American anime fanbase pushed limits further, but films on the margins, considered extreme within native borders of China lingered, available only to the most intrepid of us, graced by the luck of our NTSC VCRs being able to play their NTSC tapes, the proto-struggle for people familiar with importing DVDs from nations with different region codes than your own.

I owned two copies of Ricky. One was acquired, knowingly without subs, from a VHS trade in the mail and a second was acquired from a Chinese grocery store in Boston that also openly sold bootleg tapes (and would also chip your Playstation to play bootleg CD-R games, if you so desired). The grocer insisted that the tape was subtitled. It was not and I wouldn’t really get my head around what was happening in the movie until DVDs with dubbed audio and subtitle tracks finally landed on American shores in the new millennium. However, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on in the movie. An indomitable badass steps into a prison, upsets the order of corruption because he’s so awesome, literally rips out the bad guys’ guts, punches a hole in the prison wall. The End. But if one quality of the movie stuck out to me in a way that I wouldn’t be able to square until subtitled copies dropped it was a question I had about the prison population: Why does it all seem so packed-in with weeny, wimpy inmates whose role it is to be abused by the terrifying, clearly criminal ones? The wimps seem to outnumber the actual criminals five to one. As it would happen, Story of Ricky, in spite of how unutterably silly the whole thing is, understands that a for-profit prison needs inmates to bring in money. You need bodies in the cells to be put to work under slave labor conditions. You know? Like an American prison.

I had to look this up to find out when the first American private prisons were established and I was expecting them to be a thing of relatively recent times, as if Riki-Oh’s writer, Masahiko Takajo, was pushing the envelope to develop a ridiculous story in a ridiculous dystopia, but it turns out that the first American private prisons were established in (where else?) Texas only a few short years before the publication of the manga. Unsurprisingly, Takajo’s conclusion that an already cruel institution, such as a prison is, would be pedal-to-the-metal corrupt when state control of the prison was handed over to private enterprise. The reason that the prison is stuffed up with snivelly, weeny inmates along with predatory villains is that aforementioned quality: A private prison is a business with interest in growth and growth doesn’t happen unless you’re stuffing the cells full of people for even the most borderline of criminal offenses. The dynamics of minority populations in Hong Kong and Japan are quite different from how they are here in the states, where a black guy can get a life sentence for simply looking at a cop funny, so Lam Na Choi falls back on homogeneous inmate populations that end up literally skinned alive by Yakuza and Tong gangsters but the point is rather profound and I very seriously wonder if either Lam or Takajo have considered how close to reality they landed with what was supposed to be an outlandish prospect of a dark, nihilistic future setting?

Riki-Oh/Story of Ricky uppercut comparison

But the prescience doesn’t end there. The prison overseers, both the Warden, who shows up late in the movie to drive it to its conclusion, and the Vice Warden are both portrayed as decadent in the face of terrible injustice. The Vice Warden is introduced dining on a massive piece of steak in a huge, spacious office while inmates dine on gruel and are afforded 15 minutes to clean themselves, do their laundry and take a dump. He’s surrounded by literal shelves of porno tapes on VHS to really drive home how decadent and shitty this guy is. The Warden arrives, immediately pegged as a cruel piece of garbage but followed in tow by his enormous fail-son, an adult actor directed to behave and dress as a moronic, bratty child, much like the unbelievable fail-sons of real-life gluttonous billionaires, Wyatt Koch, perhaps. Paths diverge, I suppose, where Story of Ricky’s villainous billionaires realize that they’re evil and embrace it as the natural order of the world while the billionaires of the real world live under the impression that they’re somehow doing good for the small people. A part of me wishes that they were more like the bad guys in Story of Ricky. At the very least, someone could conceivably come along one day and punch the top of Elon Musk’s head off to the ecstatic joy of the inmates.

You don’t expect a gory martial arts movie’s hypothetical setting of a cruel slave-labor prison to hit so close to home and yet here we are, thirty years later, nervously laughing at the spectacle of Story of Ricky and how nearly perfectly it predicted the era of late-capitalism. Other movies or the era, like 1987’s The Running Man, also predicted a similar situation, sending ripples out into pop culture, inspiring further explorations of the material, for sure, but America has always had a troubling relationship to the inconvenient nasty parts of the free market and unless the director is Paul Verhoeven, any meaningful calculations on the logical outcome of the systems in play get pushed down and papered over by violent fantasies of innocent versus guilty gladiatorial matches and Arnold one-liners. Story of Ricky manages it entirely by accident, however, and snuck it into American pop culture via the OG Daily Show’s Five Questions interview segment. What a world.