Tokyo Gore Police borrows shamelessly from Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop and 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd, presenting an absurdist/fascist Tokyo where the police force has become privatized and ultra-violent. A spunky reality TV host enthusiastically broadcasts the officers movements as they hunt down and execute criminals on live TV. The city’s worst criminals are the Engineers who are infected with a virus that causes their wounds to sprout Cronenberg-like weapons. Remember how the T-800 explained that the T-1000 was unable to produce complex weapons, only “knives and stabbing weapons”? Engineers, on the other hand, are capable of producing projectile weapons and chainsaws.
Guns have little effect on Engineers. While that won’t stop the police from pumping thousands of rounds into them, their ace in the hole is Ruka (Eihi Shiina). Ruka is highly proficient with a sword, which makes her the best Engineer hunter there is; the only way to kill an Engineer is to surgically extract the biomechanical key that is hidden somewhere in their bodies. On her free time, Ruka indulges in self-harm and broods over her murdered father.
I often complain about movies shot digitally. It’s not the medium itself I hate, but the kind of creators who adopted it early as an excuse to make terrible looking movies. There have been many digital productions that look undeniably great, from Michael Mann’s Collateral to the entirety of Better Call Saul. Yet, for the most part, the medium made far too many genre films of the 2000s nearly unwatchable. Thankfully, Tokyo Gore Police is an example of early digital done right. In fact, it’s amazing how often it avoids the usual trappings of its lazy contemporaries. In the world of early-2000s Japanese exploitation, there were many.
While I don’t hate digital photography, I do hate CGI blood. Karo syrup + red food coloring is the cheapest special effect there is (next to bare breasts, to paraphrase Jim Wynorski). There’s no excuse to cheat blood other than laziness. I dragged my feet on watching Tokyo Gore Police for nearly twenty years because I assumed it would be such an offender. So many movies around the time of its release had almost entirely turned their backs on practical effects—even Takeshi Kitano’s Blind Swordsman reboot had switched almost exclusively to digital blood.
Surprisingly, Tokyo Gore Police doesn’t follow the trend. There is some digital blood in it, but I’m going to give it a pass because I’m not sure how else you depict a man propelling himself through the air using the blood jetting from his freshly amputated legs. I honestly didn’t think I would like this movie, but I loved it. It’s so gory, I almost wish I had designed the gore meter to go up to five. If this isn’t one of the bloodiest enjoyable movie ever made, I don’t know what tops it. And yes, I have seen the director’s cut of Peter Jackson’s Dead-Alive/Braindead… it’s close.
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So tomorrow is Halloween, which will bring this year’s 31 Days of Gore to a close. I always choose a banger for the final day—a movie I think is absolutely perfect for watching on Halloween night. Tune in tomorrow to see what I’ve picked. Same gore time, same gore station.
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