Tokyo Gore Police

When you start a film off with exploding heads, severed limbs that spray arterial blood like a garden hose, and a chainsaw fight, you can be pretty sure that a film is going to be over-the-top and live up to the word gore in its name.

The word "grindhouse" has been greatly abused in the last few years as certain filmakers have attempted to recreate the feel of the old exploitation flicks from the 70s. Japan also produced its fair share of exploitation films during that era, and some of them are very fine examples of the genre.

I mention this because Tokyo Gore Police is the closest thing I've seen to a real grindhouse film in the last several years, although that's not precisely a compliment. True grindhouse films were not slick, lovable productions.

In Tokyo Gore Police, Japan's police have been privatized, and they are battling horrifying mutants known as "engineers" that are incredibly hard to destroy. Ruka (who naturally dresses as a schoolgirl and wields a katana) is one of the elite cops assigned to battle the engineers. There is actually a plot in Tokyo Gore Police, and it has a few twists, but the movie is mainly interested in throwing as much blood and rubbery guts at the screen as possible.  At one point there’s a huge pile of limbs in the road; why? So a car can drive into it, of course.

Your interest in Tokyo Gore Police can be easily gauged: do you like exploding heads? Do fountains of blood (and I mean geysers of blood that someone needs an umbrella for at one point) intrigue you? Want to see someone drawn and quartered by cars and chains? Does a man shooting people to death with his enormous mutant penis sound like something you need to see? Because Tokyo Gore Police is all about gore and freakish mutants. If those things don’t sound appealing to you there’s really nothing for you here. If they do sound appealing, this film was made with you in mind.

When I say that Tokyo Gore Police is a successful throwback to grindhouse films, I mean that it has a very low-budget, and a mean, nasty feel to it. There’s no slick, stylish feeling to the movie. The effects frequently don’t look real, so your enjoyment of the film is going to depend partly on your ability to just sit back and enjoy the rubbery guts.

It’s inevitable that the film will be compared to The Machine Girl, but other than the over-the-top gore they’re really not that much alike. Tokyo Gore Police has very little sense of humor aside from some rather funny commercial bits (which were handled by Machine Girl director Noboru Iguchi). It’s a far gorier and more exploitive piece of work overall. Still, some viewers are bound to laugh at just how over-the-top and ridiculous it gets, which is part of the fun.

Tokyo Gore Police is essential viewing for anyone who loves gore or old-fashioned violent-as-hell non-CGI trashy movies. It's bound to become a cult classic.