Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

Wow! It's been a long time since I've posted anything here!  So, here you go!

I've been going through a phase of Japanese movies lately, and Japanese media in general.  In addition to the movie that this post is about ("Tokyo Gore Police"), I've also become hopelessly enamored with the anime show "Bleach", as well the movie "Ghost In The Shell" and the original "Gojira."  I've been kind of obsessed with the whole Japanese culture and much of that comes from the media that they produce.  But enough of that, on to the review!

What can I say about "Tokyo Gore Police" other than it's AWESOME!  It's definitely the Japanese B movie genre at it's finest!  It takes place in the future when the Tokyo police force has been privatized to deal with the growing crime level.  The plot centers around an officer of the law named Ruka (Eihi Shiina, who also stars in the extremely disturbing film "Audition" (1999) who has the job of hunting down criminals known as "engineers" who have subjected their bodies to a virus that causes any injury they sustain to mutate into bizarre weapons.  For example; a criminal gets his arm cut off in the first scene by Ruka's sword and from the wound he sprouts a chainsaw (awesome right?).  The main bad guy that Ruka is pursuing is a man known as the "key master" who created the virus in the first place.  The plot thickens when Ruka realizes that the man she is hunting down had a hand in killing her father when she was a young girl.

I see so many American influences is this movie!  There is a lot of David Cronenberg in the area of special effects and overall look of the movie.  It's very similar to "Scanners" (1981) "Videodrome" (1983) in the elevation of certain body parts into extraordinary weapons and in the combination of human flesh and machinery.  There is also a lot of the Bruce Campbell influence, as well as influences from classic Japanese martial arts movies like "Seven Samurai" (later to be seen in the Tarantino's Kill Bill series) and even the Korean film "Oldboy" (2003) in some of the panning fight scenes.  This is sort of in line with another Japanese film released in the same year called "The Machine Girl" which chronicles a girl avenging her brothers death with kung-fu and a machine gun arm ("Planet Terror" much?).  There

Bottom line, if you enjoy the above mentioned films, you would most likely not hate "Tokyo Gore Police", but you may not necessarily enjoy it.  "Tokyo Gore Police" gets a 4/5, because I like the references :).