Tokyo Gore Police

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.

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.

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...

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!).

Wow. That's one word to say after this master's class in splatter-fest ends. But there's more, lots more. This is classic modern exploitation fare, not exactly a very good movie, no, but absolutely spectacular in everything that it sets out to accomplish. Which is, basically, to try and out-do whatever's come before it in terms of outrageous splendor of body parts, dismemberment, be-headings, sword-cuts, arm cuts, and blood flying out like it's a dam exploded. And on top of this the filmmakers have an incredible design conceit that allows for limbs, once torn off or exploded or shredded or whatever, to spring back crazy appendages that range from heat-seeking missiles to crocodile jaws to genital "restructuring." There is no other movie quite like it.

It's also, not so oddly enough, a rip-off in part of the Paul Verhoven RoboCop/Starship Troopers style of putting in advertisements and PSA's in honor and exquisite mockery of the police-state the movie is set in (thankfully, the director, Noshihiro Nishimura, is just as brilliant at these as Verhoven, especially when doing bits like "Cutting yourself is cute!" and "Don't commit Harakiri!"), not to mention the bubbly little Japanese girl ala Battle Royale communicating to the public. But the concept itself, however ripped-off, is not exactly what's important (it's police/revenge saga mixed with wacko sci-fi bits like splicing genes from various serial killers to create the perfect psycho). What's important with Tokyo Gore Police is the daring to just go and do whatever the f*** is possible within this scope of total abhorrent violence and death and blood and guts and limbs sometimes stacked in piles ("No, no, the *right* hand!" is a great throwaway line).

Basically, if there's any other movie aside from possible Dead-Alive that can contend with it, this is the goriest movie ever made outside of the US. Even for Japan, who have produced some of the craziest action/horror/sci-fi stuff anywhere ever (Miike especially can lay claim to some of it), it's extreme and it's certainly not for the faint of heart or easily offended or yada yada. It's for the fans, the die-hard group that just can't seem to, on the contrary of most, be offended by anything. In fact, that's the joy of watching Tokyo Gore Police, which with a few scenes as exceptions where they get into real "Dramatic" moments, being that so much goes on, one thing tops the next, that it's impossible to keep a straight face. Eihi Shiina (of Audition) as the hero of the story comes across so much craziness with the "Engineers" as they're called, who face off against the militant police in a dire battle, that by the time the end credits roll we can't keep up with the final body count.

In short, this is the kind of movie that Patrick Bateman or Alexander De Large would rent about 300 times. If you know who you are in the audience, and you love insane horror that is laced with bristling, so-over-the-top-it-reaches-the-moon comedy, seek it out. You won't be disappointed as far as after-midnight/gross-out-your-girlfriend flicks go.