Tokyo Gore Police - An art-house B-movie (if such a thing exists)

I really wanted to LOVE ‘Tokyo Gore Police.’ I’m a big fan of loud, dumb, deliberately over-the-top movies, so I had high hopes for this one.  It fulfilled my expectations, but only half as much as I thought it would.

Yes, it’s a Japanese movie (so anyone who can’t watch a film with subtitles might as well move on right now) and it’s set in a futuristic Tokyo where the police have been privatised and catching criminals is big business.  This would be awkward enough, if it wasn’t for the presence of the mysterious (and also insane) ‘engineer’s (no, not the same ones from Prometheus, thankfully) who can turn severed limbs into weapons – a feat that has to be seen to be believed.  Unfortunately, the extent of these engineers’ criminal tendencies doesn’t just stop with overcharging you to repair your Honda at the garage.  They seem to delight in mass murder and general chaos.  Enter ‘Ruka’ – our surly heroine who specialises in slicing these freakish nut-jobs to pieces before they can grow a rocket launcher where their ankle used to be (seriously, that’s the sort of thing they do).  So, she sets off to hunt every last one of them down (and possibly learn how they came to be if she has the time).

It has all the makings of a decent enough B-movie, but it has the word ‘gore’ in its title.  Therefore, it has to live up to its name.  And it does.  If you like gore then you will leave this film fulfilled.  It has some of the most hideously memorable monstrosities ever to grace the silver screen.  I thought many reminded me of some sort of early David Cronenberg film where ‘body horror’ is used.  Until you’ve seen a woman turn a certain part of her anatomy into a giant crocodile and eaten a man alive then you haven’t lived.

So it has the gore.  It also has the ‘look.’ And this is where I call it *almost* an ‘art house’ film.  The director seems to have taken great care to frame and colour his shot.  There’s a lot of colour.  It’s almost like a living comic book with its brightly-coloured sets.  Plus many of the shots are long and deliberately drawn out, giving a sense of offering the viewer more than just a mere slash-up-the-monsters film.

So, it gets its plus points for being gory and nice to look at – so far so good.  The only thing I felt it lacked was a coherent story.  Yes, there is a story in there somewhere, but it seems to lose its way at times.  It’s nearly two hours long and I felt that it could have lost about twenty minutes in the first half to concentrate on getting from A to B.  The second half seems to be a little more focused and therefore makes more sense.  However, in the first act I found myself staring at the screen blankly, wondering what was going on (and just waiting for the next gore moment to arrive).

Overall, I enjoyed the film.  I’m glad I watched it and it has definitely left images in my mind that will never go away (no matter how hard I try to make them!).  I just wanted it to have a tighter story, as (when nothing hideous was happening in the first half) I found it a little boring and hard to watch.  One of those rare films where it needs a director’s cut to actually shorten the film!

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that