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best thing about that smarmy bastard Craig Kilborn’s run on
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (and later on, on
his own talk show) has to be the ridiculously violent footage that
is used to usher in his “Five Questions” segments. It
seems to be from a martial arts film of some kind, albeit a particularly
bizarre one: depending on which show you’re watching, you
see either a head or an entire body blow into a million pieces,
a bloody but cartoonish display. Where the hell do they get this
crazy crap?
Actually, it’s from a fantastic, ridiculous movie from 1992
called Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, and the footage that
Kilborn uses is, in the context of the film, relatively tame. People
trip and fall, face first, into upturned nails; villains jump out
of secret underground hiding places to kick stray dogs in half (incidentally,
the dog’s guts look kind of like lasagna and jam); torsos
are torn asunder to allow for proper access to a victim’s
intestines, which are then used to strangle said victim. In one
particularly outrageous scene, the film’s title character
and hero (played by Fan Siu Wong) has the veins in his forearm sliced
apart, to which he responds by tying them back together by hand
and screaming triumphantly. All of this is ridiculously bloody and
violent, but it’s also so far past realistic or believable
that only a 5-year-old could find it disturbing.
I guess the movie does have a plot of sorts, which I should probably
capsulize (as if it really matters). In the year 2001, in what was
then “the future,” all prisons are privately owned,
and as such much less concerned with government restrictions then
the prisons of years past. These methods of operation have served
to make prisons even more violent and abusive places than before.
At the beginning of the film, we meet Riki, who is sentenced to
20 years in one of these prisons for manslaughter and assault. He’s
a mysterious rebel who won’t play by the rules, instead spending
his time causing trouble for the corrupt warden and his super-powered
minions. You see, Riki is apparently super-strong and nigh-invincible,
not to mention a master martial artist, and—
Alright, look: none of this crap matters. You’ll figure out
the plot, and you won’t really care, anyway. Plot, character
development and all that other stuff that you look for in a “serious”
film are not this film’s concerns. The point of this movie
is to show you a constant stream of bizarre, outrageous, ridiculous
violence. There are freaks, and super powers, and even a monster
or two. Oh, and a subplot involving opium. It’s very well-paced,
which in a movie like this means there’s at least one crazy
violent act every five minutes or so. If you’re not very easily
disgusted, then you’ll find this movie nothing short of hilarious.
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