Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu

Ever since that epic 4 minute trailer was released last year, Tokyo Gore Police has been my most sought out movie for the last few months. The trailer was quite simply a glorious showcase of screwed up gore with a cool score to back. I was slightly worried that the trailer showed all the gory parts, leaving the movie with nothing interesting (which happens all too often). Fortunately I was wrong, Tokyo Gore Police is nothing short of one of the goriest, most insanely f#cked up movies ever made. Now, I will get this out of the way now, this is technically not a "good" movie: the plot is flimsy at best, the SFX are low-grade and there is no character development; however, this movie is entertaining and fun.

There is a story, which is set in the future, where criminals called "engineers" mutilate their bodies and transform into half-machine half-human monstrosities to wreck havoc. Ruka (Eihi Shiina, from Audition fame) is an "engineer" hunter who uncovers some hidden secrets involving her past from an engineer which reveal a corrupted police force.

Really, that is the extent of the story, with the rest of the movie the director's way of showcasing some serious messed up mutations and plenty of arteriole spray. This is the only movie I think you will ever see something like a chair made of human flesh which urinates on a group of people into S&M, a man with a penis gun, a woman with a snail shell and a crocodile/vagina fusion. This is all OTT and played for laughs, and I think it works that way. In no way should this be taken seriously, much like The Machine Girl, this is a ridiculous movie that really accomplishes what it sets out to. Although it runs for a good 110 minutes, it feels like its over before it starts (due to its unrelenting pace).

Already I think this is a candidate for one of the best movies of the year, and I believe its guaranteed to be a cult classic! If you enjoy Cronenberg style biological horror and enjoyed Tetsuo: Iron Man then this is right up your alley.

4½/5

The title is not just saying that, but you will indeed get a lot of gore when you watch this movie. Depending on your taste, you will be either delighted or disgusted by that very fact. I'll assume that you are more excited, if you keep on reading.

While I'm not fully aware of some of the Japanese gore movies of the recent years (mainly because they have too many "machines" in them or people turning into machines ... too weird to describe ... maybe "Cronenberg meets Miike on Speed" would be the most appropriate?), I still thought that this movie was kinda fun. Well "fun" might not be the right word, but the movie seemed to be over fast, which always is a good sign in my book (unless it's a short, but that's whole different story). If you don't mind the ridiculous plot and the "bad" (e.g. comedic) acting and enjoy the Gore, than you're given a treat here ...

There's one particular fun fact in the trivia section that I'm easily willing to believe. It states that the film was fully completed in approximately only two weeks… Well yes, that about explains why most of the events in "Tokyo Gore Police" are so damn random and why the entire screenplay appears to be improvised as they went along. Admittedly I'm not the biggest fan of this type of extremely chaotic and Manga-like Japanese fantasy/splatter, and it actually took me around 8 years before I had the courage to finally unwrap the DVD I picked up at a bargain price, but still this remained a very tiring and difficult viewing for me. I don't know about most people, but I just like a minimum of structure, logic and sense and, if that's also for you the case, then Tokyo Gore Police (and by extension the entire repertoire of weirdo Yoshihiro Nishimura) probably isn't the best choice to watch. Still, large parts of it are undeniably terrific, imaginative and truly entertaining! I'm not necessarily referring to the grotesque gore and excessive bloodshed, but rather towards the sick black humor and totally deranged little details (like eccentric supportive characters, decors, make-up designs, etc…)

I was actually lying when I implied that "Tokyo Gore Police" doesn't feature any structure whatsoever. The overall structure is that many of this film's story lines are seemingly homages to the great Sci- Fi/action classics of director Paul Verhoeven! Surely it cannot be a coincidence there are so many similarities with at least three of Verhoeven's most successful movies? The basic plot concept of the police restructuring/privatizing is clearly borrowed from "Robocop", and the sudden interludes to show fake futuristic TV-commercials are even blatantly stolen from that same 1987 classic. Lead heroine Ruca is on a mission to battle a bizarrely evil breed of super villains known as "engineers", and when they get hurt they inexplicably transform into disgusting mutant creatures. Perhaps this is just me, but many of these mutants instantly reminded me of the mutant community members on Mars in Verhoeven's "Total Recall"; especially the ones in the sex bar. I didn't spot a woman with three breasts here, but definitely a lot of other and similarly freaky stuff! And then, of course, there's the ultimate cult classic "Starship Troopers", from which "Tokyo Gore Police" imitates the satirical and unscrupulous propaganda to join the army (or, in this case, the private police force) and supposedly protect mankind by waving around massive guns and shoot people.

Yoshihiro Nishimura certainly deserves praise and applause for being able to mix all these Paul Verhoeven formulas and still insert a lot of his own demented ideas, that's for sure. Many sequences are also genuinely hilarious, like the tongue-in-cheek commercials that attempt to sell colorful self-mutilation knives or the anti-Harakiri campaign). But the truth remains also that "Tokyo Gore Police" is dreadfully overlong and too quickly become repetitive and tedious. 118 minutes is unacceptably long for nonsensical splatter, so after a short while it becomes rather boring to witness the umpteenth anatomically incorrect blood shower that gushes out of someone's body hole where their head or leg or arm used to be. In horror terms, there's nothing as painful as a boring gore flick!

Combine a Paul Verhoeven-style dystopian vision of the future (of the kind seen in Robocop and Starship Troopers) with the body-shock horror of David Cronenberg, throw in absolutely tons of OTT cartoonish gore ala Peter Jackson and some outrageously twisted horror of the kind that only the Japanese could imagine, and then add every last shred of bizarre Anime-inspired imagery that you can think of, and the result may look something like Tokyo Gore Police, a completely bonkers, gore-drenched epic from director Yoshihiro Nishimura.

Since it would take me forever and a day to try and catalogue every last moment of gore and depravity in this film, and even longer to try and describe the plot (beyond mentioning the fact that the story sees a young woman seeking revenge for her father's death), I'm not going to bother; suffice to say that gore-hounds who seek out this freaky film will be treated to continuous stomach churning images of bodily dismemberment, S & M themed grotesquery, and scenes of complete random violence from start to finish, and the fact that the story makes very little sense (at least until the very end, when plot threads finally start to come together) should not matter in the least.

Ironically, though, it is this relentless approach that stops me from giving Tokyo Gore Police a perfect 10/10. When a film begins with the gore and weirdness levels stuck firmly at ten, then there is nowhere left for the film to go. For nearly two hours, the blood sprays, limbs are ripped off, heads roll, and bodies are torn asunder; whilst this is admittedly lots of fun, it leaves little room for progression and zero chance of a genuinely satisfying climax (Oooer missus!).

This movie is proof positive that the Japanese are the craziest people on the face of the earth. It bears a striking resemblance to Robocop, while, at the same time, putting the gory effects of the Peter Weller film to shame. Commercials let us know that this epoch of Tokyo is one where self mutilation and violent death are not only the norm, they are entertainment. Where Robocop addresses the privatization of law enforcement, this film starts after the privatization occurred.

The woman who plays Ruka is an attractive stoic sort, believable as a tough woman seeking vengeance for her father's death. Ruka is an "engineer" killer. An engineer, in this movie, is kind of like a Guyver if the movie were done by the effects people from Videodrome. If you don't like gore, avoid this flick like the plague; although, if you bought or rented a movie called "Tokyo Gore Police" and didn't expect gore, there isn't much hope for you.

I gave this movie a seven out of ten because they did try to make a real movie out of this. The concept was a little dumb; but, the world that the movie was set in was interesting...