Film Review – Tokyo Gore Police
This Japanese (overdubbed) film is about a girl, Ruka, whose father was killed in the first scene and makes her want to go into crime fighting. The first few scenes are filled with BUCKETS of blood spraying all over the place, chainsaws, razor blades, and bullets. Ruka is so bad-ass, she doesn’t even get blood on her uniform while standing in the middle of gallons of blood being sprayed into the air.
Tokyo is being overrun by these criminals called “engineers” who are super smart crazy people with a common trait – they all have a specialized tumor in their bodies that must be separated from the host to actually kill them. Ruka is actually an engineer hunter for the now-privatized Tokyo police corporation. There’s a brothel in town where someone is implanting some of the girls with this tumor. The madam of the place ends up getting milked for her blood for some reason that isn’t explained, but it’s an interesting way of extracting blood – weird. And then a commercial for teen-marketed razor blades: “Wrist cutting is so stylish! Yaay Yaay Yaay!!” WTF???!!! And then, just to be gross, I think, there’s a bug eating scene where you see the guy putting live bugs into his mouth and crunching them while they squirm around and try to get out. I feel a little sick now. Hahaha.
Ruka ends up fighting an engineer who begins the fight by pulling the top half of his head off and then gun barrels appear from his eye sockets. He seems to be carrying the tumor around with him like a key and puts it in her skin to turn her into a killing machine (which she kind of already was). Apparently, he is the master-mind behind the engineer mutants. Insert another commercial for a super-sharp sword for impaling yourself. Insane. Somehow, Ruka either isn’t affected or she’s faking it, since we saw the guy stick it in her skin. Then there’s another commercial for a Wii game where you can execute people by slashing them to bits while they’re tied up. Do commercials like this really exist in Japan? I MUST find out.
I have no idea what happens next, but there’s a stripper with a penis for a nose and an eyeball in her mouth. Then there’s another stripper whose breasts have been cut in half horizontally and then stitched back together. Then the third stripper has eyeballs on stalks like a snail. At the end of the little strip show, there’s a chair that’s shaped like parts of a girl that pees on the crowd – I have no idea what goes through some of these people’s minds. And the next scene is a guy sitting in another chair getting his Jansen chopped off by the half head engineer-tumor-impregnator. As you can see, it’s a little convoluted.
Just when I thought it wasn’t able to get weirder, it DOES. A girl pops out from behind a wall and instead of legs, she’s got alligator jaws. Now just picture that for a moment: regular girl from the waist up, right leg-upper alligator jaw, left leg-lower alligator jaw. And she keeps spreading her “jaws”. Frankly, at this point, I’m impressed. Hollywood can suck it. It gets better. Another engineer shows up with a katana for a right hand and also sporting a huge deformed phallus out in the open that makes an elephant trumpet sound when they show it. Also the wang shoots some sort of bullets – you know, like they do. In the second half of the film, they explain how the engineers got started.
SPOILER: There was a kid whose policeman father got shot by an assassin of some sort. That cop was also Ruka’s father. The kid grew up to study biology and biotech and the gene samples of various serial killers, so he could get vengeance on his and Ruka’s father’s killer. Then, he began to grow an army of mutants who kill random people. Even though it’s apparently Ruka’s brother, she still chops him in half and then goes and fights a bunch of engineers. Then a prostitute-turned-engineer sprays green acid from her boobs onto her opponent – yeah, seriously. There’s an awesome drawing and quartering scene shot from four different cameras on the same screen (kind of like GoldenEye for the N64) – kudos to the director for that stroke of brilliance!
SECOND SPOILER: Remember the tumor Ruka was implanted with? Yeah, when she gets mad, it activates and turns her into some crazy engineer with an extendable moray-eel-arm and cyborg eye. She’s mad as hell. She has to fight people she used to work with, one of whom is shooting the largest gun I’ve ever seen. And why, you ask, is it so large? Well, because, obviously, it shoots dismembered fists. Awesome. The final boss at the end has this pet person who has ninja swords for legs and arms and they did an awful job of cgi-ing a fight with Ruka – enough to really anger me. The makers of this film had been fine with the makeup and fake blood up until this point. Now I’m pissed. Now the movie just got plain ridiculous! Hahaha.
This film is not the greatest thing to come out of Japan, but most of it is fairly comical. Not laugh out loud funny, but still kind of WTF-funny. I don’t know that I’d recommend it to very many normal people, but purely based on the out-of-the-box thinking that went into this film, I’m slightly impressed. You, my friends, probably won’t be.
(2 out of 5 fus)