Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Writers: Kengo Kaji, Sayako Nakoshi, Yoshihiro Nishimura
Starring: Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Camille LaBry
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 110 min
Country of Origin: Japan
Toronto After Dark Film Festival

Having seen little or heard little about Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police, I was very much looking forward to the screening; described as a movie with more blood in it than any you have ever seen. While that title is very much the truth, it isn’t quite as cool as one might think. If you can recall back to instances in Kill Bill in which a limb was severed and literally fountains of blood rained down on the set, this is what Tokyo Gore Police prides itself on doing in a very showy manner. Over and over. And Over.

The story is simple enough – just enough so that there is something to latch on to as an excuse for cutting people to shreds. A young, female Tokyo cop (Raku) privately investigates her father’s assassination in order to exact her revenge. The police force in this futuristic Tokyo has been privatized however, and beyond the corrupt bosses and corporate red tape is another problem for Raku: strange mutants known as “engineers” roam the city looking for blood. Killing these engineers is not easy as any physical damage they receive instantly revives itself and mutates into various deadly weapons. To kill them, one must cut a strange key shaped appendage from their button and break it in half.

This just sounds so intensely crazy that it has to be fun right? Well, yes and no. The opening scene of blood letting is just too ridiculous not to have fun with. Blood is everywhere. Everywhere. It sprays all over the floor, the ceiling and even the camera lens starts with droplets on it before becoming slowly drenched in the gooey, red blood. It’s over the top whacky however with not much style; just red everywhere. As limbs are removed, we hear a constant spraying sound as blood shoots like a geyser into the air and all around us. This is quite the novelty and admittedly puts the audience into a cheering fest (myself included), but the fun wears off considerably after we’ve seen it 15 times or more throughout the film.

The mutated weapons can be fun to see for a moment (a crocodile vagina being a definite highlight) until the same old blood rave occurs for the next ten minutes. The martial arts in the movie aren’t exactly dazzling and the fighting fun wears off equally as quickly as the campy novelty of the blood spray.

To be sure, there are moments of joy sprinkled throughout in which we get to see something new or eye-catching. Sexual organs turned mutant weapons can be quite entertaining. Also there are these whacky, socially incorrect commercials that pop up on the screen now and again. It was a bit lost on me, but for some reason self-mutilation is a social norm in this society and seeing commercials designed to entice teenagers to buy the latest and greatest cutting tool for the first day of school was both disturbing and satirically funny. Considering that these bits of product placement are done by guest directors (Noboru Iguchi and Yûdai Yamaguchi) doesn’t help to give me any incentive to follow the main director’s any more closely. And unfortunately these gems of madness are kind of few and far between anyway.

I suppose expectations might be what breaks my excitement for the movie. I had high hopes of something a bit more exploitative and more along the lines of a Grindhouse experience with higher “cool” quotient. But instead I got a fairly campy B-film that thinks it is more stylistic than it really is. Sure it has it’s moments of fun and many of those moments will be pretty memorable, but the movie as a whole fell sort of flat and doesn’t have a lot to offer aside from a shtick that doesn’t stray far enough into the absurd or diverse for my tastes.

Links:
IMDb profile
Official Site
Flixster Profile for Tokyo Gore Police