It’s been my experience that there are really only three kinds of Japanese horror flicks: boring, effective, and insane.
Japanese horror filmmaking has one MONSTER plus going for it–an almost culturally ingrained sense of patience that lends itself VERY well to horror film. The downside to this patience is the extreme to which they take it. Sometimes, they get it just right, and release the tension they build in regular intervals, causing occasional scares to top off a sequence of tension building. Meanwhile, sometimes, they can take the tension building too far and forget to offer scares to release it, resulting in a movie that’s just plain dull, all sizzle and no steak.
And sometimes, as is the case with today’s piece, Tokyo Gore Police, sometimes they just throw out the rule book entirely and see how much lunacy per minute they can load into one film.
In a future, or possibly just alternate, version of Tokyo, the police have been privatized by a corporation who has little regard for things like due process and Miranda rights, instead offering maximum carnage to anyone they consider guilty. Think Judge Dredd, just in Tokyo. And they’ve actually got a pretty good reason to throw out the rule books–a race of supercriminal called the Engineers, who can take their wounds and turn them into lethal weaponry. Cut off an Engineer’s hand, and in its place could grow back a giant box cutter or even a chainsaw. The only known way to kill an Engineer is by destroying a small key-shaped tumor located somewhere in their bodies. The best Engineer hunter in the business is about to go up against the man who killed her father when she was just a little girl…but what she’ll find when she confronts him will be more than she ever imagined. And it’ll have grave consequences for all of Tokyo.
Just to give you an idea of what you’ll be dealing with should you decide to see Tokyo Gore Police, the first seven minutes alone will feature fully FOUR scenes involving fountains of blood. Fountains of blood are a HUGE part of Tokyo Gore Police, and I found myself wondering more than once how they managed to get so much fake blood to shoot out at such incredible pressures that it would frequently splatter on the camera lens. There will even be a chainsaw duel. And from there, it will only get weirder. No, seriously—one Engineer, for example, will have his genitalia violently removed, only to be replaced by an enormous, prehensile gun barrel.
Do you have any idea how weird it was to say that? You just READ it and you probably had to read it twice—think of how weird it was for me. And frankly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This may be my new standard of weird in Japanese horror filmmaking. Originally, it was a little movie called Crazy Lips, but this one may just take the cake.
But despite the sheer amount of weirdness, there will be lots of violence and bloodsport and really, really sweet fight scenes that’ll give it a LOT of extra punch. Even the narrative does a fairly solid job of holding up, packing in a couple of clever twists that’ll leave you intrigued. In fact, Tokyo Gore Police will easily be a match for any action movie you’ve ever seen. I do recommend it, especially now that you know what to expect.
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I generally approve of Japanese horror, because it’s a lot like the poem. When it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s very bad indeed. Japanese horror seems to inevitably fall into one of two categories–crazy panic terror romp or chatty boring talkfest that goes nowhere.
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