- Title: Tokyo Gore Police (ja. Tôkyô Zankoku Keisatsu)
- Year: 2008
- Rating: NR
- Running Time: 109 mins
- Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura
- Writer(s): Kengo Kaji, Maki Mizui, Yoshihiro Nishimura
- Cast: Yoshihiro Nishimura, Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Yukihide Benny, Jiji Bû, Keisuke Horibe, Shoko Nakahara, Sayako Nakoshi, Maiko Asano, Kai Izumi
Goofy and gory in equal parts, Tokyo Gore Police is an unapologetic romp through the gutters of sex and violence. A minute and a half into the film, and we’ve already been treated to a head exploding in a ridiculous cloud of gore. And by the time we’re done with the opening scene we’ve witnessed chainsaw mutilation, cannibalism, self-mutilation, evisceration, more mutilation, exploding bullet wounds, more exploding heads, and someone being chopped in half laterally. All of which is accompanied by geyser upon geyser of blood.
It’s really pretty fun — for a while. One of the big issues with Tokyo Gore Police is that it’s so damn long, around two hours, for a movie that is purely concerned with spectacle. The plot is straightforward — in the weird near future Tokyo’s privatized police force, dressed in armor reminiscent of samurai and armed with katana and assault rifle, is busy kicking ass. But there is a new breed of criminal out there, engineers, gore freaks that sprout weapons from their wounds. The first engineer we encounter loses his hand and a chainsaw sprouts in its place. A chainsaw he can launch and twirl around on the end of some ropey bit of viscera.
Ruka, our heroine, is a hunter for the police, and her job is to hunt down and kill engineers and look sexy doing it. Over the course of the film we find out the main engineer baddie — a serial killer who at one point gets the top half of his head cut off and sprouts guns from his eye sockets — is somehow linked to the death of Ruka’s father. Needless to say, Ruka goes after bloody (and I mean bloody) revenge.
And there really is not a whole lot more to say — Tokyo Gore Police is a movie you will like, if you like this sort of movie. Cheesy yet inventive, it engages itself in a continual game of one-upmanship to the very end. So we get torture and weapon-limbed amputees, gimps and weird fetish mutants, badguys armed with cock-cannons and enormous box-cutter arms, exsanguinated corpses stuffed into cardboard boxes and . . . well, you get the idea. Probably the best parts of the film are the television commercial parodies that lend a satirical edge to what is essentially a farce. Rarely is the gore the sort of thing to make you squeamish, because it is firmly tongue-in-cheek. Tokyo Gore Police isn’t shock horror so much as schlock horror, and it’s a movie in its own bizzaro reality. Unfortunately that reality does get old.
It gets old because there’s nothing to hold onto in the film save spectacle — that’s all there is. It’s not the sort of thing you watch when you want an immersive film experience. In fact, I think the ideal setting for Tokyo Gore Police is a night in with jaded and similarly-minded friends, as it sure as hell will give you something to talk and laugh about for a couple of hours.
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