Tokyo Gore Police

(2008)***1/2

The violence in Tokyo Gore Police is gratuitous and excessive -- for the viewer as well as the characters inhabiting this fictional Tokyo. It's not simply that we see a guy getting his arms sliced off and the heroine walking away under a shower of blood (casually holding up a parasol to keep the ick out of her hair), it's that the guy's only crime was copping a feel.


She's a cop, our heroine, and though the punishment she delivers here seems grossly out of proportion with the crime, it's mild compared to what she does on a normal day on the job. The whole of the Tokyo police force has become hardened and bloodthirsty in the face of the nasty threat of the Engineers. Engineers are bio-enhanced villains -- wound one and an organic weapon springs from the wound. There's only one way to kill them and that's to destroy this fleshy key thing that's embedded somewhere in their body. Until you do that, any attempt to take them down only makes them a more formidable opponent.


The Tokyo police have had to learn to deal with lots of carnage and heavy casualties as part of their job. It's made them all crazy. The worst spree of violence in the movie comes from them.


Interesting thing about the movie is that, despite the Engineer/Police State nastiness, life in Tokyo seems to be pretty normal. We get to see some city shots -- there's still nightlife and bustle, enormous neon signs still shine from every building. Even for the Engineers -- they're not all criminals, it turns out. It's more like a subculture -- a kinky one at that. You've already seen pictures of the snail-chick in Octopunk's review. That's from a scene in an Engineer sex club and there's way more weirdness having drinks there -- there are fangs in mouths, fangs on tits, there are eyeballs in strange places. Then there's...I don't even know what the hell this is, but it pees on everybody in the club and they love it.


I took like a billion screen-captures from Tokyo Gore Police, and it was really hard deciding which to post -- the images from this movie are all pretty great. The movie is often downright disgusting (yay!), but coming from a culture that has long embraced its inner weirdo, it's disgusting in style. And the women are scorching hot, if you're into chicks who can eat your head with their hands. If Johnny Sweatpants were to make a movie, this is probably what he'd make.

"No one ever goes back to pick up the body parts." - Charlie Brown