During a battle between a woman with a serpent-like left hand and a hunchbacked doctor with a cannon that fires severed hands, a line is spoken. The doctor says, "I am disappointed and I am happy." These are the types of movie lines that critics such as myself crave. It sums up the frustration or joy experiencing with celluloid.
TOKYO GORE POLICE is simply a makeup effects film for gore fanatics. It relishes in the ultraviolence of human bodies and the grotesque modifications of them. There is some joy in this fact but director Yoshihiro Nishimura's exploration further into the film with a lame script hinders its configuration.
The plot is an invisible entity that only re-exists when every they tap out of violent B-roll footage. Ruka (Eihi Shiina) is a officer for the newly privatized police force specially designed to take out "engineers", homicidal human beings with mutated appendages. As part of the newly privatized police force in Japan, she kills the altered citizens of Tokyo while following her personal vendetta against the assassin who murdered her father. Both come to head with the when she meets up with the Keyman, a serial killer and creator of the "engineers."
Story shouldn't have to have too much importance for this film but it needs to due to the tone. TOKYO GORE POLICE wants to be a Verhoeven satire, a surrealistic gory fantasy, and a human tragedy at the same time. The scenes of the latter causes the viewer to question its placement and the hypocritical messages. There's a montage sequence where people are being slaughtered in over-the-top manners to make you laugh along, and then suddenly Ruka is crying over this fact and sad music plays. Essentially, Nishimura hands you out a hot fudge sundae only to spit in it after a couple of mouth fulls.
Ruka also is an annoying problem. She is a bare-bones copy of a popular female character type in independent Japanese films and anime. With a wink toward The A.V. Club's "Maniac Pixie Dream Girl", I have dubbed this type as the Existential Brood Girl. The word "Lonely" was going to be added, but the term is already redundant as it is. Ruka has all of the same mannerisms as the Existential Brood Girl: beautiful yet anti-social, self-inflicting and suicidal in physical altercations, and can't get over family problems and deaths. The Existential Brood Girl is always a problem as a main character but Ruka is so underdeveloped and generic that there is no want to cheer or root. Even the film breaks off from her to go to more violent and disturbing events to keep the tempo going.
Despite these problems with the overall script, including its obvious plot twists and direction, the film at least displays a mastery of makeup and special effects by Nishimura. It achieves a NAKED LUNCH like status of hallucinatory distortions and nearly perfect reproductions of the human body. The Keyman is placed as an important part of this equation, due to the abilities of his "keys." These can create "locks" on selected individuals that rip open the flesh when open. Another small part of the film has him exsanguinate the undesirables and contort their bodies into cardboard boxes. These effects are made surprisingly frightening and disturbing and help make the antagonist much more threatening.
While the gore in the film works effectively, thus living up to its placement in the title, the abundance of blood hurts the violence experience. When human parts starts flying and falling off, long sprays of blood obviously come out in a reminiscence of old samurai films. The problem is that it hits the camera frame a lot. This constant awareness and overflow ruins the impact of scenes where it is part of the act, such as when a driver wipes the piles of blood off his windshield. It also doesn't help that the blood is very watery instead of the Kensington Gore variety.
While my analysis leads more towards the negatives, TOKYO GORE POLICE is an okay film for those looking for blood and guts. It doesn't have the great overall charm of other gory comedy films such as DEAD ALIVE/BRAINDEAD, but is fine for what it is. Just make sure to shut off and unplug the cords to your brain.
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