Tokyo Gore Police

You know how the Double Down has those edited videos that blend anime porn, foreign sexploitation, horror trailers, underground cartoons and old commercials? Well, Moss can save himself some work for the next round and just throw on a copy of Tokyo Gore Police, which has most of those ingredients chopped up and ready to serve.

Chopped up indeed. Tokyo Gore Police takes blood-spewing, limb-severing grossness and slams it to the nth level. If it wasn't so ridiculous, it'd be upsetting -- ridiculous not only in the sense of a nonsensical plot, but it's also a movie that knows when you need to see that the exploding head is almost laughably (and entirely laughably, if you've had a few beers) fake. Also because sometimes they just say "Fuck it," point a hose full of red tempera paint at the camera and let 'er rip.

Tokyo Gore Police is set in a dystopian future (Is there any other kind?) where there's lots of violence and crime and it's always night. The Tokyo Police Corporation are locked in perpetual battle with "the Engineers," a mutant race of criminals that sprout weapons from their wounds. So, if you cut an engineer's hand off, it may grow a chainsaw. Hack a leg off, it might turn into a sword... and other bizarre and brutal transformations.

As you can see, the cops need a little help and that help comes in the form of Ruka, miniskirted master warrior, daughter of an assassinated police captain. Her entrance has distinct echoes of Maggie Cheung in The Heroic Trio, except the cutting part is a little more like a Lifetime movie. There's also a bit of noir in the sets and styling, but the excess of red throws it off a little...

Another feature of Tokyo Gore Police is the use of "commercials" for things like cartoon character wrist-cutter knives or PSAs against committing hara-kiri over your job, as well as "news reports" on the latest grotesque crime. It also has a very cool sort of Shonen Knife/5678s/Stereo Total Japanese garage rock soundtrack.

We've also got a brothel scene that is a triple-X mutant Mos Eisley horrorshow -- it makes the gay bar in Dinah East look like a Mormon Tupperware party and the eyeballs in the nipples bit from Gothic like something from Forest Gump.

Oh, and there's a lot of gimps in this movie. Lotta gimps. Variations on a gimp suit you never thought of before -- actually you get to see nice closeups of a number of sex toys. I'd suggest that the various Adult Emporiums and Love Stores put it on screen to encourage sales, except you know, the violence. And the blood. And the vagina dentata...

As Ruka, Eihi Shiina is blank-faced and emotionally distant but, well, that does make her a welcome bit of solidity in a film of whirling excess, as well as an example of the troubled-child-grows-up-into-implacable-killing-machine hero meme familiar from so many action flicks. And, as you can tell from these stills, the lady knows how to create a picture on screen.

Know what happens when you grab my ass on the subway?
My samurai sword makes a Bellagio fountain out of your grimy mitts.

There's some excess plot about an engineer called the Keymaker who is out to get our heroine (But why?), who is also out to get whoever killed her father (But who?) Tokyo Gore Police runs a little long and they could have done without some of the storyline. Heaven knows they weren't going to cut any of the effects. If sometimes the movie seems to stop entirely to flaunt some particularly visceral and horrible bit of construction, bear in mind that the director, Yoshihira Nishimura, is best known for his work on special effects makeup and he let himself go a bit nuts on sort of David Cronenberg/Tetsuo: The Iron Man hybrids...

 Why, yes, Todd Akin, a woman's body does "have a way of shutting that down."
Wanna see it?

Tokyo Gore Police is not everyone's cup of tea. In fact, i am pretty sure it is a cup of tea that will cause most people to make a distressed noise and immediately rush to pour it out in the sink. (And even if you're inured to fake blood and body parts, they swing around and get you with someone eating bugs on the subway.) But, if you like the gross and the black humor and the hallucinatory-level weird -- or just dig special-effects makeup --it's worth a look, although you probably will also be spending some of the running time looking away...

Jesus Christ, i thought BatRatSpiderCrab was horrible....