Review of Tokyo Gore Police (2008) by Mario G — 16 Jan 2010

VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL director Yoshihiro Nishimura and scenarists Kengo Kaji and Sayako Nakoshi have fashioned the most outlandishly extreme sci-fi, horror satire this side of David Croneberg called TOKYO GORE POLICE.

This 110-minute mayhem ranks as the bloodliest, goriest, homicidal, mutant, manhunt melodrama about death, dismemberment, and mutilation that you will ever see--if you can stomach it--and it never takes itself seriously.

Scattered throughout TOKYO GORE POLICE are faux commercials and Public Service Announcements--in the tradition of ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS--that advocate the advantages of self-mutilation and the disadvantages of committing harakiri.

Nothing is either too bizarre or grotesque in this imaginative splatter-gorefest. The high-octane action takes place in the not-to-distant future after the Tokyo Police has been privatized. They face the most incredible nemesises--referred to here as engineers--and these engineers can survive the worst that the samurai-clad, assault weapons wielding police can mete out.

These psychotic serial killers have genetically mutated bodies that enable them to withstand the worst wounds and then bio-fuse those hideous wounds with weapons. So lethal are these murderers that the Tokyo Police have formed a special squad to eliminate them.

The chief hunter of this squad is Ruka (Eihi Shiina of AUDITION) who runs around looking like a school girl in high-top boots, white shirt, tie, and a razor-edged samurai sword. Ruka does not play. She slashes with surgical abandon.

Hunting our resourceful heroine is the Key Man (Itsuji Itao), an insane scientist who has let his well-intentioned aims pervert himself in his crusade against serial killers. Basically, Key Man has injected himself with the genes from the worst serial killers in the world and transformed himself into the worst of the worst.

Moreover, he has unleashed these engineers on Tokyo and they go around killing prostitutes, gangsters and innocent bystanders. They do not kill like most killers. You see them stab their poor victims with slender metal pipes, attact bottles to the pipes, drain the bodies of blood, hack them up into quarter-sections and neatly stack them in receptacles.

The first engineer is a wild man with a chainsaw attached to his arm. For the record, Nishimura created the special effects for MACHINE GIRL. TOKYO GORE POLICE bristles with surprise after surprise and never degenerates into boredom.

The violence is as extreme as extreme can be. In one scene, a mutant girl tears off the penis from a man with whom she is having oral sex. Key Man shows up to drill a hole in the ankle of their victim, but the victim surprises them and whips out his small submachine gun and riddles the evil girl until she has no legs from the knees down.

As the man without a penis tries to escape, the engineer girl mutates so that her thighs turn into the grisly jaws of a crocodile and she munches on the unfortunate victim. Our heroine eventually learns that her murdered father had a secret, too.

Believe me, unless you can handle extreme gore, TOKYO GORE POLICE is not for you.