The creators of The Machine Girl return with their most ambitious - and gruesome - work to date with Tokyo Gore Police.

Movie Summary

Popzara Rating

I’m not going to recommend Tokyo Gore Police to anyone I don’t know well enough to know they can tolerate it. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any psychiatric counseling that might result from frail minds witnessing even a few seconds of any given scene, and heaven knows there’s nothing remotely mainstream about it. An exercise in motion and randomness, it’s a work of such overwhelming filth and filthy ideas that it might reflect badly on those who even speak its name. But every now and then a little filth is exactly what I’m looking for, so I wonder what that says about me? Release Date: 01/13/09 MPAA Rating : NR Studio: Media Blasters

Written by Nathan Evans

The Japanese assault on good taste and decency continues with the release of Tokyo Gore Police (Tokyo Zankoku Keisatsu), a follow-up of sorts to last year’s splatterfest The Machine Girl that goes further and deeper in its mission to resurrect grindhouse-style filmmaking than Quentin Tarantino could ever dream of.  Much of the creative team behind the exquisitely gory Machine Girl returns to wreck havoc on unsuspecting moviegoers who may have accidently wandered into the wrong theater or picked up the wrong DVD.  Distributor Media Blasters would love nothing better than to watch you squirm in your seat, wondering what sort of person would ever make this trash, let alone enjoy it.

Those easily offended have no place even reading this impression, nor should they even consider picking this one up at the local video store.  Your insulated notion that all foreign films are culturally superior to their American counterparts will be shattered into a million bits of bloody entrails and distended organs that go well past excessive.  If the idea of watching nearly two hours of appendage-cleaving, artistic eviscerations, and at least one extremely agile quadruple-amputee gimp (though fashionably sporting prosthetic blades) isn’t your thing, leave now.  There’s nothing more to see and the rest of your day – and subsequent nights – will thank you.

But for the benefit of those sticking it out, know that the future of Tokyo belongs to the feudal-era dressed police state in a brutal melding of George Orwell’s 1984, Blade Runner, and just about any Miike Takahashi film.  In this alternate-future the city is being terrorized by the arrival of engineers, who are human-hybrid constructs with the astonishing ability to turn any injury into mutated weaponry, a skill that becomes increasingly deadly (and sexual) as the plot unfolds.  The force’s top engineer-killing officer Ruka is a bit of basket case herself, but that’s something you might expect from a professional killer who watched her policeman father’s head explode into itty bits of goo.

It’s a good thing that none of the cast stands out, with the possible exception of Eihi Shiina (most notable as the date from hell in Audition) as the lead.  Behind the shock and awe of human entrails and exposed gray matter – complete with metallic pipes – beats the heart of absolute imagination and macabre discovery.  I suppose much credit has to go to first-time director Yoshihiro Nishimura, the Special-FX guru who helped bring the aforementioned Machine Girl to life and directs like the Japanese-equivalent to Guillermo del Toro.  From the cheap-looking foam body parts to the ocean of ‘blood’ itself, it’s pretty obvious the film is a low-budget affair, yet Nishimura manages to wring every visual extravagance from every last yen.

One stroke of brilliance - perhaps the most offensive spot in the film - features an off-duty police officer slumming it up in a rather unique flesh-market for some fun.  Only this spot has a bevy of mutilated females on the menu, surgically crafted into grotesque shapes and figures for the pleasure of the highest bidder.  The girl with distended eyeballs (via tubes) was particularly gross, although nothing tops the surrealistic imagery of the unlucky lass transformed into a chair – yes, a chair.  Throw in some unnecessary water sports and you’ve got the makings of a fairy tale from hell.

It’s the ultimate fetish, capped with an equally gruesome (though inspired) battle with a power drill, machine gun, and serrated-vagina monster.

For a film dripping in the red stuff and sporting the word Gore in its title, Tokyo Gore Police is almost oxymoronic in how liberally and gleefully it manages to send arterial sprays gushing.  Severed limbs and detached body parts pump the red stuff like sprinklers, at one point so intensely that a key villain (to which there are many) manages to fly about on the outward gush alone.  The result is somewhat ironic, in that each successive attempt to ‘out-shock’ the former has a desensitizing effect on the latter.  By the time a converted engineer appears, with his genetically enhanced penis-gun cannon blazing and fibrous prosthetic leg the effect is almost anti-climatic.  The ending suggests that we’ll see more of the gore sometime in the future, though I’m at a loss to see how they’ll top this.

The film is also hilarious, not just in its own profound silliness but in how sly the embedded social commentary is.  Mock advertisements are sprinkled throughout and are much appreciated, giving this macabre world a sense of satirical morbidity that hit home – particularly to the Japanese.  Infomercials hocking the latest fad are smartly targeted at the country’s social mores and jarring mix of sexual deviance and repression.  One such spot featuring a gaggle of schoolgirls gleefully slitting their wrists and singing the praises of a designer cutter:  “It’s a cutter with a cute design.”  Another features a torture-simulator, complete with realistic hacking ‘n slashing thanks to a Wii-like controller that would surely never grace retail shelves (although would probably satiate the fanboys if it did).

Fans of Robocop will be tickled pink.

I’m not going to recommend Tokyo Gore Police to anyone I don’t know well enough to know they can tolerate it.  I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any psychiatric counseling that might result from frail minds witnessing even a few seconds of any given scene, and heaven knows there’s nothing remotely mainstream about it.  An exercise in motion and randomness, it’s a work of such overwhelming filth and filthy ideas that it might reflect badly on those who even speak its name.  But every now and then a little filth is exactly what I’m looking for, so I wonder what that says about me?