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Director: Lam Nai-choi
Screenplay: Lam Nai-choi
Based on a manga by Tetsuya
Saruwatari
Cast: Fan Siu-Wong (as Ricky Ho);
Fan Mei-Sheng (as Assistant Warden Dan/Cyclops); Ho Ka-Kui (as The Warden); Yukari
Oshima (as Rogan); Tamba Tetsuro (as Master Zhang); Gloria Yip (as Anne); Kwok
Chun-Fung (as Lin Hung/Andrew); Frankie Chin (as Oscar); Koichi Sugisaki (as Tarzan);
Wong Kwai-Hung (as Brandon)
My review of the live action
adaptation of Tetsuya Saruwatari's
manga is going to be drastically effected by having been able to read said
manga, an issue that can entirely effect someone's opinion on the adaptation
depending on the context, and definitely is the case for me here. Never
officially released in English, fans have translated it and quite a few years
ago I read the entirety in full. Trained by Kazuo
Koike, the legendary manga writer of Crying
Freeman, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Lady Snowblood, Saruwatari has developed his own success through series like Tough, Riki-Oh and Dog Soldier.
He also learnt from Koike, whilst
also the artist of his own work, a frantic style of storytelling that, whilst Koike is critically acclaimed, has made
his teacher also notorious for his almost insane plot twists, complete
disregard for tastefulness and the sense of having had his work, just seeing
some of the anime adaptations like Mad Bull
34 (1990-2), spun out as it was from the hellishly short deadlines of manga
publication and the need to constantly keep a reader turning pages constantly. Riki-Oh, a live action Hong Kong film,
is exceptionally faithful to this
lunacy, even close to panels and details from the original manga, but it's also
only the first few chapters following the introduction of the titular character
(Fan Siu-Wong), a noble man sent to
jail in a privatised prison whose martial arts ability allows him to withstand
pain and mutilation that would kill a regular human being, and in turn transform
opponents into meat pate with a single blow.
A large part of the weight the
film adaptation suffers from is that it only covers the beginning, where the
stakes are simply the evil prison warden (Ho
Ka-Kui), his underling Cyclops (Fan
Mei-Sheng), and the four prisoners that lead each ward - North, South,
East, West - with incredible power, such as the beautifully androgynous and
dangerous Rogan (legendary Japanese actress/stunt woman/martial artist Yukari Oshima playing a man) to the giant
Tarzan (Koichi Sugisaki) whose
ability to rush a man's head with a single clap gave the film a clip that could
be used in American media to help it live on in infamy. The full manga in
comparison however is so mind-bogglingly stranger and mad after these initial chapters that, not only
would this adaptation seen far tamer in comparison, but I was likely permanently
effected after reading said manga after all these years. A story where Riki-Oh is actually a Jewish-Japanese
superhero whose bullet wounds in his chest, with the bullets still left within
them, are actually shaped like a Star of David in the pages, and is fighting on
the side of atheist, Japanese-Jewish heroes fighting for goodness and atomic
energy against the forces of evil, including Chinese Nazis and a twin brother
who became evil after a game of tag as a child, who believe in religion. Against
this and such sights as Riki-Oh punching out an elephant, fighting grunts on miniature
AT-ATs, a minor villain whose similarity to M. Bison/Vega from the Street Fighter games is so close its
likely Capcom tipped their hat to
him, another a sadist who uses his ceiling fan death blades just on a servant
who gets a hair in his tea, and it's a one-off whose list of events I've barely
scratched the surface of. Alongside dialogue so strange it actually starts to
make sense in its randomness and the extreme gore, and the live action film has
a mountain to scale in comparison.
What I have to admire with the
adaptation though is that it does manage to adapt it well, right down to the
obsession with the violent splatter being intercut with its naive emotional
core, where crying of manly tears is common place from Ricky, lamenting all
those who die violently in spite of his own responsibility for knocking half a
person's face off or splitting a giant fat man's stomach open like a balloon
full of red paint. It's also feels like one of the more off-beat films that
came over from Hong Kong cinema, making the decision to adapt a Japanese manga
like it with incredible faithfulness a rare case of material so perfectly
fitting its new home, fitting the tone of many Hong Kong films as eccentric as
it equally. The one difference to a lot of the more lurid martial arts films
however is that, whilst there's plenty of actors in the cast who are
exceptionally talented in this area, the combat ability depicted in the film is
significantly more simplistic, so that rather than the spectacle that is the
common benchmark of Hong Kong cinema of exceptional and athletic fight scenes, the
result is actually a Herschell Gordon
Lewis splatter film on a higher budget with more elaborate production
design. A punch doesn't just hit flesh but take a huge chunk off a person, half
their hand if they are throwing one back, or the whole jaw. This is the film
where, straight from the manga, someone losing a fight cuts open their own
stomach and attempts to strangle their opponent with their own exposed
intestines. This gore, in elaborate cheery prophetic glory, is ridiculous and
without concept of real life physics, possible to heal a severed tendon by tying
up again, not how tendons work in real life but part of the crazed logic the
manga gained from Kazuo Koike's
teachings to the author.
A lot of what you get from the
film since the plot is without the usual level of martial arts, baring these
gore effects, is the eccentricities particularly in its cast of characters to
latch onto. Fan Siu-Wong is playing a
cipher with an oddly schizophrenic attitude to morality, blaming another for a
prisoner dying when he finds their family photo but only minutes earlier
punching half his face off, and a knack for blazers in the flashback explaining
his current situation when dealing with the happiness he used to have. Anyone
who becomes his character's friend is the same, all of them dying in nasty ways
in a way that could become a morbid drinking game. The side characters in terms
of the villains are the real interest, from Cyclops, the most valuable thing of the film who
has a hook hand, a glass eye he keeps breath mints in, and Mei-Sheng playing him as a bumbling yet sinister figure perfectly,
or Ka-Kui as the warden, his chubby
man-child nephew already memorable, but by himself in his sadistic glee of what he does or being chosen to run the prison,
and all its evil shenanigans, because he's the best at martial arts, one of the
most memorable lines of dialogue. It's this broadness which compensates for the
simplicity of the story if you can appreciate it. For me it's more difficult in spite of these great aspects. Much of this review is based on the problem of
comparing it to the original source material, not only in terms of the madness
in the original but Saruwatari's art
managing to make such silliness and gore actually artistically awe inspiring in
how realistic and detailed it is, the grey and muted palette of the prison
setting and style of the film only awakened when someone bursts a blood vessel.
Still deserving of its reputation as a one-off gore kung-fu fest, but for me
personally it falls behind other films like it especially from the Shaw Brothers which didn't sacrifice the
martial arts and elaborate stories for the gore.
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