Not long after an online teaser for “Machine Girl” got fanboys’ panties wet, the team (including folks from U.S. distributor, Media Blasters) behind this martial arts gorefest released a teaser for their next film. Like “Machine Girl”, it showed off an abundance of depravity and it boasted a title that few could deny – “Tokyo Gore Police”. The film enjoyed a succesful genre fest run during the latter half of 2008 and is now on DVD for it to live on and become the cult classic it is destined to be.
But is it a good movie? Yeah, it’s not bad.
“Tokyo Gore Police” places us in Tokyo in the near future where the city’s police force has become privatized. Their main concern, the hunting and destroying of “engineers” – human beings who have been modified to become monsters if they sustain injury. Enter a vicious young woman, Ruka, who many of you will recognize as Eihi Shiina from Takashi Miike’s “Audition”, and as the city’s top engineer hunter she continues to dig herself further into the perverse society of engineers, inadvertently shaking loose some rather disturbing truths from her childhood.
With its futuristic cop story and the inclusion of random commercials featuring over-the-top violence, “Tokyo Gore Police” has a real “Robocop” feel about it. And, like Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic, it’s plenty gory, too. It has to be, it’s called “Tokyo Gore Police”! But where “Robocop” had its violence evenly paced throughout its running time, giving it maximum impact, “Tokyo Gore Police” just cakes it on, nearly non-stop. It gets to be so much, in fact, that you shouldn’t be surprised if you get a little lost as to what the hell is going on every once in a while. Definitely not helping in that department is the fact that there really isn’t a strong “good guy” to identify with or pull for. Everybody in this movie is f****d up. Even our hero, Ruka, is a wristcutter who needs a major attitude adjustment. It’s 109 minutes of doom and gloom.
But, hey, I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. Not too much, anyway. Where it fails in solid storytelling, it makes up for in gory fun. Lovers of the splattery cult classic “Story of Ricky” will no doubt find plenty to cheer about here. “Tokyo Gore Police” has that same penchant for violence so ridiculous you’ll want to smash a beer bottle over your head in salute. Recommended for parties and prisons.
