Tokyo Gore Police

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...

Wowza! Along the lines of Evil Dead and Dead Alive, this splatterfest is sure to be a cult classic. Eihi Shiina, famous for playing the crazy girl in Takashi Miike's Audition, stars as a member of Tokyo's police force. Her specialty is hunting "engineers", genetically modified humans who can reconstitute their flesh wounds as weapons. I think 90% of this film's budget was spent on red Kool-Ade and fire hoses. Every severed limb produces approximately 30 gallons of fake blood. A movie like this can easily become repetitive and thus boring, but the true worth of Tokyo Gore Police comes from its endless inventiveness. Yoshihiro Nishimura, who has spent his career up to now as a makeup artist, keeps upping the ante, showing us some horrible new thing we've never seen previously in every sequence. It's all extraordinarily disgusting and depraved, but it's the best film of this type I've seen in a while.

Blood is a very important thing, I mean very important. Without it people, mammals in general, birds, fish, lizards, hell even insects tend to die. I'm afraid that is indeed true, luckily for us "Tokyo Gore Police" teaches us that an ordinary human body contains enough blood to put the entire European continent under water... under blood really. But blood can be very helpful, amazing I know, but "Tokyo Gore Police" shows us how we can use this completely ordinary not-so-interesting combination of some cells and some plasma as a stylish fashion accessory for our daily clothes. Even more, blood can help a human being fulfill one of his most ancient, ever since that video on youtube with that guy running around flapping his arms, and holy desires, namely to fly. To do so you must simply cut off or saw of your legs from the knee down and the endless gush of arterial blood will do the rest. Blood can also be used for offensive purposes, to accomplish this we must simply combine ordinary blood tissue with some brain and voila, bloody brain bullets with some nice visual and physical effect, also that way you can save some iron, some petrol, some gun powder thus ending the Financial crisis.

But "Tokyo Gore Police" teaches us so much more. Here are some short descriptions of the wisdom and brilliance director Yoshihiro Nishimura and writers Kengo Kaji and Sayako Nakoshi demonstrate in this film, in no particular order: - don't ever get on the wrong side with a woman who has jaws for legs. - on that same note, sex really hurts. - I mean really really hurts. - The worst thing that can happen to you if you're a policeman wearing a modern samurai armor is your friend, comrade and colleague trying to kill you with his penis. - having four katanas instead of four limbs looks kind of awesome. - having four machineguns instead of four limbs looks kind of awesome. - if you're planning on doing a chainsaw duel with a friend, don't do it in a crowded area, people might get hurt, oh, what am I saying. - don't ever buy one of those fist firing miniguns, pretty useless stuff.

And if that's not all, "Tokyo Gore Police" continually mocks itself, in a way, satirizing the whole violence-obsessed media by means of mock commercials, much in the same ways as Paul Verhoven did in his classic "Starship Troopers".

And if you seriously think "Tokyo Gore Police" is more cynical than some random action blockbuster just because it shows actual violence on screen, you need to rethink your moral values.

Seriously now, it's a wonderful splice of pure Japanese splatter, that doesn't takes itself seriously, but is actually pretty smart and inventive monster of a film. And running at 2 hours long it never bores with its head-on, full throttle pace, the only thing you could wish for is a sequel. Yoshihiro Nishimura, Kengo Kaji, Sayako Nakoshi a tip my hat off to you sirs, because this is a film worthy of the title: bloody brilliant.

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!).

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!