Tokyo Gore Police

2008 gore police movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Ruka, a witness to her father's head explosion, overcomes tragedy to become the main mutant-killing cop. Those mutants, known as "engineers," have the ability to turn their injuries into weapons, and Ruka and her po-po buddies have to find out who is behind their creation. Meanwhile, she tries to figure out who was responsible for her father's murder.

Well, this was hard to take seriously. You're five minutes in and you've already got an exploding head, a decapitation, a severed arm that grows back as a slimy chainsaw arm, a guy who gets a chainsaw arm to the mouth, a fight with chainsaws. You have to wonder: Did this movie shoot its proverbial wad too early? How can anything top this? Well, hold on to your scalps, motherfucker, because this is a wild ride down a bloody slip 'n' slide. I was unsure whether or not I was liking this movie and actually had to watch it in a few installments. Around the time a character I didn't recognize Michael-Jacksoned his crotch and ended up at a party where people are wearing inflatable costumes and gas masks and the entertainment is a urinating chair woman and a snail girl, I realized that this is my kind of movie. My kind of party, too! I sighed and realized that I would eventually, when my stomach could handle it, watch all of Yoshihiro Nishimura's movies. I figured that Meatball Machine was one of those, but apparently there are a bunch of people in Japan making movies like this which once again makes me wonder what is wrong with the Japanese. H-bomb dust is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. Since I watched this movie in fifteen installments, I found it almost completely incomprehensible. But its cheap style--lots of askew camera work, assaults on at least two of your senses, a rhythm inspired by shaken baby syndrome--keeps you enthralled, and the mathematical part of your brain has all kinds of fun trying to figure out what the budget for "red squirty stuff" might have been. There are some goofy satirical moments in this with some commercials that ironically seem to poke fun at the masses' need for violence--including a Wii-type game where you slice a guy up--and some commercial propaganda about how nice the police are, but this is either too silly or too completely insane to really make any kind of point. You really can't watch the scene where a guy [SPOILER ALERT] gets his penis bitten off by a woman whose legs later turns into a giant alligator (or crocodile) mouth and take things seriously for the same reason that somebody trying to film my honeymoon to release as a sex tape wouldn't have been able to take things seriously. I'm sure the actor who played the guy who gets his penis bitten off read all the way to the part of the script that said "And then the guy walks in with his new giant penis gun," stopped reading, and said, "OK, I don't need to see anymore. I'm in!"

That penis gun puts us all to shame.

If you're ever in the right mood for something like this, I'm kind of worried about you. But this will definitely be your cup of whatever that red squirty stuff is if you are.

3 comments:

  1. Throwing a "motherfucker" in anything adds panache. I learned that in Blog Writing 101, second day of class.

    I'm just glad you and Catalog printer found the subtext. A lot of people are going to read this post about 'Tokyo Gore Police' and not even realize that I'm writing about club flyers and embossed business cards.

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  2. Did Samuel L. Jackson teach that course?

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  3. No, but that reminds me...Samuel L. is in 'Johnny Suede' for about 14 seconds. You are going to watch our Oprah Movie Club selection this month, right? On Netflix Instant.

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