General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (力王)

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (力王, also known as Story of Ricky) is a 1991 Hong Kong martial arts splatter film written and directed by Lam Nai-choi (藍乃才), based on the Japanese manga of the same name by Masahiko Takajo and Tetsuya Saruwatari.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	力王 (Lik Wong); released in the West as Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky or Story of Ricky¹⁰
Source	Adaptation of the manga Riki-Oh by Masahiko Takajo and Tetsuya Saruwatari¹¹
Runtime and language	91 minutes, in Cantonese¹²
Critical standing	89% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 9 reviews; 85% Popcornmeter from more than 5,000 ratings¹

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The story is set in 2001, in a future in which all correctional facilities have been privatized. Ricky, a martial artist with superhuman strength, is found "guilty" of the manslaughter of an infamous crime boss and sent to a corrupt private prison.² Time Out's summary adds the motive: his girlfriend threw herself off a roof while being chased by heroin dealers, and Ricky took revenge on those responsible.³

Inside the prison, Ricky works his way through a hierarchy of opponents. The assistant warden and the Four Heavenly Kings, the bosses of the prison's four blocks, are themselves superpowered, and Ricky battles each in turn before a final showdown with the Warden.⁴ A Chinese-language synopsis adds that Ricky exposes the warden as the hidden head of a drug operation inside the prison and burns the poppy fields cultivated there.⁵

The violence and its effects

The film's reputation rests on the extremity of its gore. Bloody Disgusting places it, alongside Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, among the two bloodiest films of the early 1990s in terms of sheer quantity of blood on screen.⁴ Time Out describes the practical effects: heads pop, skin rips, jaws smash, and one character pulls out his own lower intestine and tries to strangle the hero with it.³ Ricky himself is superpowered in both strength and resistance to damage; in one fight he ties together a severed artery or nerve before returning to battle.⁴

The makeup effects were the work of Chi-Wai Cheung and Fung-Yin Cheng. Bloody Disgusting judges that the low budget produced some cheesy effects, but that in pure quantity of splatter the film has no equal.⁴ The climactic fight left actor Fan Siu-wong unable to wash the red dye off his skin for days.⁴

Censorship and the Category III rating

The film arrived just after Hong Kong introduced its three-tier film classification system, and directors of the period were exploring subject matter the older censorship had ruled out; Riki-Oh is a product of that moment.⁶ Abroad it was banned in Ireland and rated 18 in Germany and K18 in Finland.⁵

Cast and production notes

Fan Siu-wong, a martial artist who had trained at the Shaolin temple, played his first leading role here.⁶ Yukari Oshima, a Japanese karate champion, plays one of the Four Heavenly Kings, a male role.² In the warden's monstrous transformed state, the actor Lam Suet performed the role under heavy prosthetic makeup, a shoot he later recalled as lasting six hours in makeup and ending with him immersed in a vat of prop meat paste that had fermented for hours.⁶

Reception and cult status

On release the film was a modest genre entry in its home market, but it circulated in the West in the 1990s on VHS and laserdisc, often dubbed, and was embraced by cult audiences and midnight-movie programmers.⁷ Critics have been broadly positive about its excess: Time Out gave it 3 of 5 stars and called it a perfect Friday-night audience movie, comparing its dismemberment comedy to the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.³ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds 89% from 9 critics and 85% from more than 5,000 audience ratings.¹ Reviewers repeatedly note the same combination: a weak script and hammy acting carried by inventive, cartoonish carnage.³^•⁸

The film's afterlife has been durable. The M+ museum in Hong Kong screened it in 2024 in its Rediscoveries program, noting that Fan's performance has made Ricky a meme hero more than thirty years on.⁹ 88 Films issued a new 4K restoration on UHD Blu-ray, and the film has appeared on the Criterion Channel in the United States.²

The director

Lam Nai-choi was born in Hong Kong in 1952. He entered the industry as a lighting assistant at Shaw Brothers and became a cinematographer before directing; his debut was On the Wrong Track (單程路, 1981), followed by Men from the Gutter (城寨出來者, 1982) and several Hong Kong-Japan co-productions such as The Peacock King (孔雀王子, 1988). Riki-Oh was followed by his final film, The Cat (衛斯理之老貓, 1992), adapted from a novel by the Hong Kong science fiction writer Ni Kuang; he then left the film industry, reportedly working as a travel photographer and later volunteering in orphanages and rural education programs in northern Guangdong.⁹^•⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026