It was adapted from some ultraviolent manga that in itself was probably a take-off on Fist of the North Star. Some fly-by-night Hong Kong film company made the live action movie, and in spite of the obviously thin budget still tried to retain the unrealistic superviolence present in the comic, which lead to unintentional comedy on an epic scale.
Most of the film's graphic scenes employ the "sudden jump cut to poorly constructed latex / paper mache dummy" technique, most famously seen on The Daily Show back around 1997 when it was still hosted by smirky fratboy Craig Kilborn (they used the clip of Bear Man crushing some dummy's head like a juice-filled pinata as an intro to their Five Questions segment).
The plot is pretty much insultingly stupid. Riki is some guy run into jail for reasons not elaborated upon at the start of the movie. We soon see that it's vision of the future isn't too far off from reality, though, as it tells us -
Anyway, the prison is completely corrupt and run by this group of supernatural martial arts masters called the "Gang of Four", under direction of the porcine Assistant Warden and the crazy demon martial arts master Warden. Riki gets himself into trouble early when he casually trips a high-ranking underling of the Gang into some random board full of nails that just appears out of nowhere on the floor -
The guy gets mad so he unleashes this other guy named Silly Lung (no joke) on Riki, unfortunately he doesn't do too well against him -
Then in obligatory time-filling Flashback Sequence we learn that Riki learned the deadly art of Qi Gong from his uncle, which apparently gives him the power to punch holes in people's stomachs. I thought Qi Gong was all about breathing exercises and simple movements to reduce stress or whatever, but apparently it has a dark side.
Anyway, after ten minutes of that we fill in another ten minutes as Riki visits the piggish Assistant Warden, who is in charge while the Warden is away.
Ricki pisses this guy off, so he sends the first Gang of Four leader, a tattooed guy named Oscar, to duel Riki to the death. Oscar proceeds to throw glass dust in Riki's eyes -
And to sever the tendons in Riki's right arm, which Riki apparently stitches up with a granny knot -
But in spite of his best efforts you can probably guess what happens -
The rest of the movie proceeds in this video game style, as Riki just goes from Boss Fight to Boss Fight against the Gang of Four with little interceding plot or character development. Basically every sympathetic character, within ten minutes of their introduction, meets a fate similar to this one -
Leaving little but lots of typical Hong Kong choreographed kung fu wire fights interspersed with more hilarious shots of latex dummies spewing gallons of red paint like giant Fruit Gushers.
Eventually we learn why Riki is in jail too, thanks to one of the most hilarious "throwing a dummy off of a roof" scenes I've ever seen in cinema.
Of course there are some obligatory torture scenes, then eventually we get to the final battle with Warden, who turns out to be some latex demon monstrosity -
Complete garbage, yeah, but pretty hilarious garbage if you're in the right frame of mind.
Links :
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