AllMovie

Those unfamiliar with Japan's "pinky violence' genre, take heed: Rica represents this style in its purest, most prototypical form. The script is a machine-gun-paced fever dream that mixes girl-power sentiment, outbursts of splashy violence and prurient (s)exploitation in a "something for everybody" style that is straight-faced enough to keep this combination from feeling as contradictory as it actually is. Despite the lurid content, the filmmaking is as professional as any Hollywood studio film of the same era: the script packs in a pretty complex array of characters and plot twists into a compact space and Ko Nakahira's crisp, efficient direction keeps everything in its proper place. At the heart of the whole spectacle is Rika Aoki's performance at the title character: she accepts all the cruelty thrown her way with a surly, deadpan expression that says "so what?" as she fights her way through countless double-crosses. She's a surreal heroine for a surreal storyline, the cherry atop this sundae that mixes grindhouse carnage and studio filmmaking in a thoroughly disorienting (but intriguing) style. As the above description should indicate, Rica is a film for specialized tastes -- but the cult film fans are likely to eat up the film's candy-coated seediness with a grin.