Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Tokyo Gore Police delivers exactly what its title promises. In the future the police force has been privatized and its methods against the newly arisen threat of fiendish mutant "Engineers" can be described as brutish and barbaric at best. The movie is nothing more than one action-packed scene after another, riddled with scenes of bizarre creatures, even stranger people and quite honestly things you wouldn't see even while high as a kite.And for what it is, it's great. This is quintessential gore film where it's more important to go through as many liters of blood as humanly possible instead of focusing on the story. It has its own style and I cannot lie and say that I don't appreciate it every now and then. The visuals are fantastically strange, the action works very well and the setting is great.Unfortunately the movie suffers from slight pacing and acting problems. Not that the latter is really required from a decent gore film, but it's always a plus. Eihi Shiina plays our main character, Ruka, a detached loner with a definite talent for combat. Unfortunately she plays her a bit too detached, leaving us detached from the experience as well. The rest of the cast is also prone to overacting, which can be problematic. But the biggest problem is the film's tendency to overindulge on the gore. The very first fight is simply minutes after minutes of blood splashing around. It looks impressive on a technical level, but if the viewer gets bored by the blood before the first fight of the movie is over, you're doing something wrong. And yes, I said that blood trumps story in gore films, but even then there needs to be even an attempt for both.I cannot really call Tokyo Gore Police a good film. It's an intriguing and entertaining one, certainly, but it's more style than substance, which is a problem most gore film battle with, admittedly. Worth a watch if you're a fan of the genre, others should steer clear.

This is possibly THE WORST FILM IN CREATION. The actors are BAD. The only thing that this film has is gore and blood and guts. Thats it. If your looking for a decent film that actually has a storyline and reasonably good acting then don't even bother with this film. If you can get past just the trailer then you have BAD TASTE!!! This is definitely a perfect film for stoned off their trolleys people as quoted by another reviewer. I normally do love gore fest films such as Planet Terror but this film is absolutely nothing like that. That film was actually ridiculously brilliant. I don't know what people are talking about when they say the visual effects are brilliant, they are possible THE WORST effects to ever be put into a film, they couldn't be anymore UNREALISTIC!!! This is what happens when film makers who don't have a lot of money make a horror movie. They literally just fill it from beginning to end with nothing but blood, guts and sex!!! What happened to taking advice from film makers like George A Romero who didn't bother with either barely any nudity or none at all in all of his films. You shouldn't have to cram all this crap into a film to get it to sell. I know they say sex sells but get real, have at least some class!!!

Those viewers who thought the pyrotechnic gore FX of Yoshihiro Nishimura in the 2001 cult item "Suicide Club" to be a bit too over the top may want to hold on to their seats and wrap themselves in a full-length rubber coverall as "Tokyo Gore Police" begins to unspool. Living up to its title in spades, this 2008 offering does indeed give us a look at the cops in Japan's capital city in the near future, and ladles out more of the red stuff than "The Wild Bunch," "El Topo," "The Evil Dead" AND "Dead Alive" (four films once deemed the ne plus ultra of violence) put together...and then some! In this film, Nishimura has developed the "human blood fountain" to a fine art, a concept that I believe Akira Kurosawa initially used to great shock effect at the tail end of 1962's "Sanjuro." Viewers with any sort of aversion to depictions of blood on screen must certainly be advised to look elsewhere, as "Tokyo Gore Police" most likely features more cc's than any picture in cinema history.In the film, the Tokyo police force has been privatized, and is indeed called the Tokyo Police Corporation. The main job of the company is fighting the human mutants known as Engineers, a hideous group whose keynote feature is their regrowth of actual weapons to replace any injured body part! (Yes, the picture does indeed feature elements of both "Blade Runner" and "RoboCop" in its truly mind-boggling story line.) One of the most skilled of the Engineer trackers is a beautiful young cop named Ruka (Eihi Shiina, who many will recall as the female lead in 1999's "Audition," a film that I have not mustered the courage to watch yet), who is haunted by the assassination of her father, also a cop, many years earlier. Before long, Ruka finds herself before "Keyman," the scientific genius who has created the Engineers (in a memorable sequence, Keyman rips off the top of his own head, to reveal his naked brain, which promptly sprouts twin-barreled, hornlike bullet spitters!), and is vouchsafed some startling information regarding her own history....I mentioned before that those who are easily queased out should probably skip this picture, but the truth is that the gore on display here is so completely over the top, so very cartoonish in quality, so stylized and UNrealistic, that it really did not bother this viewer...for the most part. Not that many scenes aren't designed to stun and shock the audience. Thus, we get to see such sanguinary set pieces as a buzzing chain saw going into someone's open mouth; a hooker/madam getting impaled down her throat; a subway freak chewing on bugs in delectable close-up; a rotary saw cutting off somebody's fingers; a beautiful Engineer squirting green acid from her breasts and melting the face off of a female cop; the drawing and quartering of another female Engineer, and on and on. I describe these cartoonish gross-outs in detail because your reaction to them will in large part determine your fitness to appreciate this truly eye-popping film. Take this unforgettable sequence, for example: A man goes into a rock club/bordello and engages a prostitute, who proceeds to service him orally. But the hooker happens to be an Engineer, who bites off the john's, uh, John Thomas, turning the screaming dude into a human blood geyser! Keyman enters, and proceeds to power drill through the hapless guy's leg. But the bloody john manages to shoot his way free, only to learn that the prostitute has transformed herself into a scurrying Venus flytrap of sorts! And don't feel too badly for the emasculated customer; he soon returns as an Engineer himself, with a ghastly yard-long phallus...with a blasting gun at the end of it! Anyway, if this sounds like your cup of (very Red Zinger) tea, you might just have a bloody great time here; the film should prove to be absolute manna for all the gorehounds in the audience."Tokyo Gore Police," hemoglobin aside, is a remarkable film for many reasons. The movie is ultrastylish throughout, excitingly directed by first-timer Nishimura, features fantastic use of color (lots of reds, of course), and contains a vibrant, dynamic score by Koh Nakagawa. The film looks sleek and flashy; can it really have been shot in just two weeks, as a certain Wiki site proclaims? As mentioned, it is at times completely over the top (such as Ruka's final fight, which is so very over the top that it practically blasts into orbit!), and sporadically dishes out bits of welcome humor (such as those TV ads for the Police Corp., the wrist cutters and the sword of Kohka) throughout. Perhaps best of all, though, is Eihi herself. It really is quite incredible to witness this gorgeous woman impassively slicing her victims with chain saw and samurai sword. She is remarkably cool, totally unflappable in the face of unbelievable carnage, and looks fantastic dressed in white blouse, black tie, miniskirt, boots and trench coat (surely, a hotter-looking outfit than the Darth Vader getups that her fellow cops sport!). With less than a few dozen lines of dialogue, she easily steals the film, despite the amazing visuals surrounding her. I have not even mentioned the six-barreled "fist cannon" or the female freak with swords instead of arms and legs, but I think you begin to get the idea. "Tokyo Gore Police" surely is some kind of fantastic, unforgettable package. And the film looks great in its present DVD incarnation, too, from the always dependable Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock series. You know, I think I might be ready for "Audition" now. If I can make it through "Tokyo Gore Police," I should be ready for just about anything!

Aren't Japanese people the best at making bizarre movies? You know, they can take an idea totally lame and senseless like "a Japanese pro-wrestler who transforms into a squid before he dies so he can fight again and go back with his girlfriend" and turn it in one of my favorite movies ever ("Calamari Wrestler"), but this... is not the case. Now, I have seen a lot of Japanese crap, and I love most of it, my favorite gore one is "Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl", which is original, funny, senseless, with cheap effects and a lot of energy put into it; Tokyo Gore Police fails at all of those things, one thing is doing a gore movie with a plot always developing, and another thing is doing a gore movie with random blood at screen for a ridiculous amount of time, the plot stops suddenly for more than 10 minutes to show random flashbacks that don't make sense, violence sequences that can last less than a minute but instead they last more than 5, characters that suddenly appear, you don't know who they're and "oh, he is dead. Maybe I would be touched in some way if he had any character development at all". To sum up this movie is bad, REALLY BAD, and is the only Japanese bizarre movie that I gave less than 5 stars, avoid this one if you can and watch something else.