Tokyo Gore Police

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

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.

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!

The Tokyo Police were privatized, and the new force was facing 'engineers'. Those are criminals who are implanted with a certain device that makes them almost impossible to kill, as each severed part then is turned into some type of weapon. And there is plenty of gore, but mainly in a very cartoonish fashion. More like a garden sprinkler shooting streams of blood, although at one point some of the violence was pixilated, which didn't make sense in context of the rest of the movie. Ruka is one of their best killers of 'engineers'. There is a thread that is developed, but it really makes little sense considering the rest of the movie is so over the top with spewing blood and fake body parts. For those fans who want to see non-stop spattering blood, they will probably like it. It gets tiresome after awhile. They did have several very unique guns that were used. But the movie really is non-stop gore.

I thought I would like this movie,it had everything that I was expecting and more but really after watching it I was a bit like...huh? The movie isn't bad, it isn't good, it's kind of just there, if you want to see bucket loads of gore and really bizarre creature people then by all means watch. I just wasn't grossed out by much of the movie, the uh club part was kinda sick though. I guess I was just expecting a bit more from this movie and it didn't deliver everything that I thought it would with such a high score on this website.

Gore fans will probably like it but in comparison to other Japanese horror or splatter films such as Koroshiya 1, it just didn't deliver.