I… don’t even know where to start. Imagine every Chuck Norris fact you’ve ever heard is true. Ricky would still mutilate Mr. Norris five times over and not get winded. The film follows Ricky (Siu-Wong Fan) as he’s sent to prison for some unknown reason (at least at first). It becomes clear that this prison is corrupt and run by an evil warden (Ka-Kui Ho) and assistant warden (Faan Mooi Saang). He uses his superhuman strength, which he’s had since he was like “7 or 8,” to fight back against them and the Gang of Four–four equally skilled fighters from each of the four cell blocks.

Ricky is basically like the offspring of Bruce Lee and Jesus. He’s been wronged, and he’s out for some glorious blood-spilling. He’s quite easily one of the biggest badasses I’ve seen on film. I mean, the dude gets the tendons in his arm cut so that his arm is useless… so he pulls the tendons up from his arm with his other hand and teeth and ties them back together so he can go back to fighting. I’ve seen a ton of movies, both good and bad, and this is the film that made me go “Fuck… why bother trying to make movies? I could never do anything more awesome than this.”

The violence, blood, and gore is off the charts. I mean, it’s not like a slasher film or torture porn film or anything. Think of it like… the insanity of a Miike film (such as Ichi the Killer), but mixed with the over-the-top cheese of something like Dead Alive. This is the kind of movie that has characters punching off limbs left and right. There’s a part where Ricky punches a guy through throat to come back up out of the jaw to knock off his whole chin area. There’s a scene where he punches a guy so hard his stomach rips open and blood and guts slip out. Ricky is such a badass that, in the middle of a fight, his opponent basically says “Ricky! You’re too awesome!” before performing harakiri/seppuku on himself… and still tries to kill Ricky with his own intestines. It’s amazing. None of it is remotely realistic–it’s clearly dummies and fakes the majority of the time. So if you have a weak stomach, it’s too fake and over-the-top for it to actually bother anyone.

The writing and characterizations in this are amazing, too. There’s dialogue in this that’s so silly you have to laugh. Part of it is probably translation, but some just has to be intentionally bad. And then you have some really crazy characters. There’s the assistant warden with a hook for a hand and a fake eye (in which he keeps mints). There’s a morbidly obese inmate who was put in solitary for eating an entire horse who is hired to kill Ricky (“I was promised seven bags of rice to turn you into mince meat and put you in a pie!”). And then there’s the Gang of Four (one of which is actually played by a female, though it’s a male character). There’s just too much awesomeness to discuss.

It’s no exaggeration when I say that this film has now become one of my all-time favorite movies. I was literally halfway through the movie when I went on to Amazon to buy a copy. It’s so over-the-top and ridiculous, so incredibly gory (in the cheesy kind of way), and so freakin’ awesome that it’s impossible not to love this movie. Why more people don’t talk about it, I’ll never know. Stop whatever you’re doing and watch this. Now.

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