The Police Farce

Tokyo Gore Police
Dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura
2008
Why must Japan always make us feel inadequate? Even when it comes to the quality of our zombie ass kickin’ women? All America has farted out in the last decade as been Milla Jovovich’s Alice from the retarded Resident Evil (which we had to steal from Nippon anyway) and its increasingly retarded-er sequels. Japan, on the other hand, come correct with Eiha Shiina (of Audition fame) as Ruka, the katana wielding heroine of the intestine-soaked Tokyo Gore Police. And I bet Shiina didn’t have to fuck the director to get the part either.
The lovely Ruka, as a member of a specialized privatized police force, employs said katana to hunt down “engineers,” bio-engineered serial killers whose bodies sprout all manner of interesting weapon appendages – chainsaw arms, gun eyes, crocodile jaw legs – when injured.
It’s like the two St. Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, giving guided tours of choice S&M haunts in Tokyo’s seedy Kabukicho district complete with complementary lectures on our post-singularity body-modding future.

Zombology: OK, so I’m cheating a bit again. The engineers don’t necessarily qualify as true zombies, but the gore factor and body count are elevated enough to earn them a hall pass to the zombie compound. You see, the mysterious Key Man has been running around town implanting unsuspecting people with key shaped tumors that turn them into engineers, setting them loose to terrorize the populace. Only Ruka and her coworkers at the Tokyo Police Corporation – which wouldn’t happen to have some mysterious connection to the Key Man, do you think? – to keep the peace with an arsenal of neo-samurai armor and extreme violence.

Taken individually, each kill is either hilariously perverse or grotesquely bloody, including one nifty visual call back to the classic Lady Snowblood flicks. However, as a whole, Tokyo Gore Police’s meandering plot just never coheres. But the film just darts from one fucked up set piece and crackpot character to the next. Against all that absurdity, Shiina’s straight faced performance keeps the whole affair from collapsing into unsalvageable stupidity. Tokyo Gore Police only sucks 19 percent as bad as Hell of the Living Dead.