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Netflix sez: Based on your recent viewing habits, we believe you would enjoy Tokyo Gore Police. They may be right. They may be wrong. I think though that either way, this is going to be an experience that shall prove Interesting for our purposes. Let's go with the dub, I'm multitasking. OK, uh, we just went from zero to awesome pretty darn quick. The opening credits have a bunch of bright happy yellow flowers and a really wonderful bad dub girl talking about how she'd like to grow up to be a police officer just like her dead, whose smiling face is then shown on screen... at which point it explodes in hilarious practical-effects fashion. And... oh wow. Just wow. OK, if anyone is going to rent this based on my ramblings? You watch this sucker dubbed. These voices are epic. So... we're switching between some crazy cannibal doing his thing,what I suspect to be the main character slashing the heck out of her wrist with a razor blade, and this totally over the top cutesy dispatcher, and a chainsaw wielding loony, and some cops with techno red eyepatches laying into him with machine guns... under what appears to be the Tokyo tower. So... yeah. We've got ourselves a movie with an honest title here.
OH WOW! OK, so then the chainsaw wielding loony's arm mutates and encompass his chainsaw, which is now flingable at random cops with a retractable chain dragging it back to his wrist, in very Sam Raimi-like chainsaw-cam shots. So now the main character is going off to fight him, and how does she get up to the base of the tower? By taking her bazooka, firing it at the ground, and rocketing upwards in this totally unrealistic fashion. Then they end up having this crazy chainsaw duel, wherein the chainsaw wielding loony eventually has his chainsaw arm severed and our hero is holding one in each hand. After carving him up like crazy, she drops both, and draws her katana, to cut him and half and give us this movie's title screen.
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And then we immediately cut to this Terran Dominion Propaganda style clip of the crazy privatized samurai-styled police force Japan has adopted here in, uh, the future I guess? And... now our main character, whose name I might as well use because ultra-violent Japanese schoolgirls are so ubiquitous, Ruka, is uh... dragging her kill back to her crazy hunchbacked eye-patched mad scientist of a boss. And her internal monolog is explaining how the bad guys are called Engineers, and can only be killed by cutting key shaped tumors out of their crazy mutant bodies. Oh, and just so we're clear on this? Ruka IS indeed an official member of the police force. She's got her little police woman diner-worker hat on now while cruising around. Apparently she doesn't get the silly samurai helmet, because she's a girl. Or a specialist. Or a non-generic character. In any case, the movie has finally stopped being awesome for a minute or so, giving me this chance to catch up. Oh yeah, and did I mention the big where she was slashing her wrist like there was no tomorrow? Because apparently that's her thing. And I mean like, swinging with wild abandon with a straight razor here, not the whole slow cutting thing emo kids do. Anyway, break time is apparently over, it's time to get back to the utterly ridiculous over the top violence it seems!
So let's see... we appear to have an actual samurai, possibly some sort of zombie, taking his pet uh... quadriplegic Voldo for a walk through the police station and breathing heavily. "Happy birthday Ruka!" Um... what? OK, apparently the full on samurai with the pet stumpy-Voldo is the chief of police. Oh wow. Just wow. This movie is so insanely awesome and awesomely insane. Now here's a break from the happy but crazy police party with much smoking of cigars and petting of weirdo gimp, for a flashback o Ruka's 11th birthday with her mother freaking out and cutting HER wrists which turns into uh... a weird string of visually similar cut-betweens ending on a wriggling worm-like vibrator. Tokyo Abrupt Scene Transition Police! Uh, yeah, some creepy guy apparently just finished a session with a Japanese Schoolgirl dressed hooker where this was apparently just used, off camera thanks. Then yon hooker wanders off to see someone with a key tumor in a jar, while her boss, who I think is also the woman who was running the bar where Ruka took a quick break between chainsaw mutilation and her surprise party is uh... getting murdered it seems. Rather brutally. And trying to convince the guy doing so to let her set him up with one of her hookers that's into being cut up. Of course, she isn't so much being stabbed as uh... you know those weird pump things that suck all the moisture out of people? I think they used'em to kill people in Dune... no wait, it was Tank Girl. Dear gods why do I KNOW that? But, yeah, those. And then we abruptly cut away to what turns out to be a public service announcement encouraging people to not commit hara-kiri when they screw up at work.
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OK, now, I REALLY just CANNOT CONVEY how hilarious the dub voice is on the cutesy police dispatcher girl here. This is either the worst dub ever, or the best, and it's totally on her either way. But, yeah, anyway. Level 2! Someone has been dismembering hookers and stuffing them in cardboard boxes! Ruka, equip the anachronistic tantaba parasol hooker gear and go undercover! And here's another commercial. Direct quote: "It's so cool and stylish! New wrist cutter design YAY! To die for! In 3 different colors!" And... here's a guy eating grubs on the subway. Also beetles. Live ones these. And... wow, here's a really gross disgusting extreme close-up of his mouth. And old man? You just grabbed the WRONG subway butt. As punishment he is dragged off into the woods and his arms are cut off. By a cop in a kimono with a parasol. Which she opens to shield herself from all the fire hose pressure wrist blood. "An act of molestation is serious sir." So yeah, back to being undercover now. And hey, keen, here's another flashback to dad's head exploding. Apparently it's because a mysterious man in black shot it. Wow, what a boring reason for someone's head to explode in such a weird floppy-chunks fashion. Snapping out of flashback mode, here's a mysterious black-hooded figure as the only other person on the subway now. Not that he looks anything like the guy i the flashback, they just both happen to be dressed in all black. It's a pretty common color for evil and all. This guy though, yeah, this guy is evidently our hooker-slayer. He has Tools. Also, you know, a box of hooker chunks he left in the next car. That's kind of incriminating. So uh, later, I guess, in the forest. Er, in the long descending staircase in the tiny shack in the forest. So yeah. Fight scene. Not a whole lot to say here for once. It's just a perfectly normal slash slash parry parry fight scene. Then the music cuts out abruptly halfway through when Ruka anticlimactically slices horizontally through his head. Oh yeah, apparently the deal with Engineers is, first you kill'em, then they mutate to their monstery form. So... one blood geyser later, now his brain is exposed, and there's two long protruding gun barrels where his eyes used to be. So, I guess they're firing Mind Bullets at her if we wanna get all pop cultural about it. Anyway, she missed the key-tumor which was clearly visible in his cheek and- oh wow. OK, he pulls out a spare one of these, waves it over her arm, causing a keyhole to appear, in her arm mind you. Inserting and turning the tumor key causes her arm to, well, open up, allowing him to lay it in there against her uh, tibia? and seal it in, "You're one of us now!" Random katana commercial!
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I'm guessing they're kinda going for the Robocop deal with these commercials as scene breaks, but honestly, since the whole movie is so crazy fast paced and weird, usually by the time you realize this isn't just plain the next scene, the actual next scene is starting. Now they're performing an autopsy on the top of this guy's head. The rest of him got away and all. I seriously love the crazy mad scientist guy the cops have. Also how they're Samurai Cops. I to need to remember to use these guys as a visual baseline for the samurai cop race in SK there. By the way, these brief moments when i get to stop and ramble? These are the only points in the movie when there isn't so much going on that I have to type as fast as I can to keep up with all the crazy. There is a LOT of crazy, with very little in between.
Oh! New commercial! Remote control execution! This one's pretty darn great in that it's transparently a commercial for an official Nintendo-published Wii game... where your remote swings control an actual robotic executioner's blade in a prison some time. It's totally spot on with the whole family of active people laughing and swinging the remote at the TV in their nice clean wholesome apartment with its nice white couch. Just needs the bowing 'i's at the end. So uh... I was going to say we seem to have hit a bit of a lull in the movie, just showing people doing research, cackling at the moon, stuff like that, but surprise! Recruitment commercial for the police! Where some guy talks about his wasted life for a while, then pulls out two machine guns with head-explodey bullets and starts gunning down little kids. Then the police catch him, wail on him with katanas for a while, and the kids with unexploded heads laugh and think they're cool and play football with his severed head. You heard me, I said football! I may be an American but I'm sorry, the game where you move the ball with just your feet gets to be called football. For logic's sake!
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And uh... yeah, meanwhile, some guy here has just wandered into a really weird strip club. Like, really weird. Rule 34 weird. We've got someone with a really phallic Pinochio nose. We have a girl who's totally topless but has had her nipples surgically removed so, I THINK that's OK? We have the one thing I'm willing to take a screenshot of in this scene. We've got some kind of snail girl. Like, she has snail shells over her nipples, and a giant snail shell on her back, and it seems her eyes have been pulled forward about a foot out from the eye sockets, supported by transparent glass tubes. Reminds me of Uzumaki, but THOSE snail people were kinda cute... uh, not in the context that works here, just in the not totally disgusting non-threatening sense. There's also... uh... the chair. OK, I don't think it's even possible for me to describe this to you. We've got a chair. And... a woman's somehow still living skin has been used to upholster it and... you know, let me just pause this for a moment and get you up to speed. OK, so. Girl-skin chair. Flattened out boobs dig into your back, pulsing heartbeat behind them. Then sitting on the chair is... uh... apparently this somehow still-alive-as-upholstery-girl's vivisected out crotch meat, shaped like a red gory heart. And then it starts urinating all over the assembled crowd as they applaud it. Then after that the random guy we've been following through here goes to the back room for the oddly mundane experience of sitting in a chair while a totally looking normal girl does what such people do with their mouths in such settings. By which, of course, I mean biting off his penis and spitting it across the room. I mean, it's a freaky setting. I gotta tell you too, if you see only ONE movie where someone gets his penis bitten off in what he initially believes to be a blow job... horrifyingly enough there's like 2 other movies I've seen recently that I might recommend over this one. What the hell is motivating me to watch all these things! If I were getting paid, sure, but these ads bring in 2 cents on a good day! Dear gods! So yeah, apparently the /b/ club here is run by Mind Bullets guy, who is, I suppose, our main villain. He's outfitting Mr. No-Wang here with a tumor key, but first he's getting some wacky experimental surgery. Mine is a drill that shall pierce your ankle! He sure is screaming a lot, you'd figure the surprise castration would have him in shock by now. Anyway, after going through all that, he finally gets around to pulling a gun, shooting, oh hey, it wasn't a total normie it was scar-boob girl. Anyway, he shoots her a whole lot and she screams even more than he does. Remember what happens when you kill a bad guy in this movie? That's right! They mutate into a more powerful and screwed up form! In this case, uh, remember that guy from Devilman Woman? You know, the guy from the Very Special Episode of Devilman Woman? Yeah, she totally turns into the female equivalent of that. Normal from the waste up, from the waist down just a huge set of vaguely snake-like horizontally opening jaws, which runs down the hallway on her hands in pretty goofy fashion and bites his arm off. I have to say too, after the rest of that scene, I have no objections here. So then Vagina Dentata Supreme goes to just plain eat the rest of him, but, well, not like those connect to a digestive system, so somehow he manages to get his arm back out, jury rig the trigger finger to a string, and blast the sucker right in the I guess it's still technically a baby-maker. He even gets a one-liner off... and, you know, then Mind Bullets comes and sticks the key in him anyway.
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Wow. In what, despite the length of that paragraph, was honestly a REALLY short time, this movie suddenly crossed every line of decency there was to cross that isn't a spoiler to the ending of Old Boy, and yet, honestly, I am not particularly offended. See, the thing of it is, it was all SO messed up and SO rapid that my mind wasn't able to process what I was seeing at the time. I could never watch this movie again of course, because now I'm desensitized enough that it'd actually register (man, screen shot grabbing is going to be daunting here), and you might not be able to go watch it now, having foreknowledge, but in context, yeah, you're protected by your own rationality there. And you know, then the next scene is a bit of an epilogue, where that guy who got various hunks bitten off monsters out and attacks a whole bunch of cops, and I'm just forced to officially name him Mr. Elephant. Because they actually use an elephant sound effect. For when his 4 foot long prehensile wang is holding a gun and mowing people down. Honestly though, I can deal with it, because by having it holding a revolver, it's really kinda hard to think of it as genitalia anymore, and come on! Elephant sound effect!
Now Ruka, remember her? See, you don't. You TOTALLY lost the plot of this movie because of that one scene. Yeah. Main character. Has a key now. She goes to visit Mind Bullets at his house. He tells her a nice sappy story with children's show-esque water-colored illustrations about this police sniper, how good he was, and how happy he was to see the eyes go sailing away when peoples heads exploded. So yeah, it's this long tragic story of how Mind Bullets' poor misunderstood heroic police sniper dad was forced through poverty and political pressuring to make Ruka's dad head explode. At which point his own head was made to explode by some other sniper, which just seems kinda wasteful. And I really mean at which point. They show the full length flash back, and it's like, one second later. So, these two share a childhood trauma. One decided to become a cop, which involves chainsaw duels and bazooka jumping. The other decided to study the DNA of criminals to, you know, eugenics crime out of existence. Then he snapped, wanted revenge, and injected himself with All Of Killer Genes. No really, that's what he did. Then he jumped off a roof, splattered on the pavement, and found himself at the door of preposterous magic plot contrivance, wherein the devil, who looks like a kindly old jewish fella as played by Patton Oswald, with tiny devil horns, handed him the original key tumor. Shoved it in his head apparently. He woke up, took it home, made some copies, and dude! A tumor so is not "a gene" dude! This long convoluted speech over with, he explains that you know, Ruka's whole revenge motive so doesn't work, and they should really team up against the conspiratorial jerk who caused the whole mess. Gasp! Not Chief Samurai Cop Samurai! He's just plain cool!
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So yeah, naturally she just slices his head in half. That angle so totally doesn't work. She didn't become a cop for revenge, she just wanted to be a cop just like daddy, and there's no two wrongs make a right rule when you hire a second assassin to kill the first assassin you hired. Anyway though, that over with, we now just have this general montage of like, plain ol' not at all over the top violence. Basically, we've just got a whole lot of cops killing a whole bunch of people because, well, you know, they ARE the Tokyo Gore Police. It's like, their whole deal. And presumably these people getting sliced in half are dangerous criminals. Uh, somewhere in here we have a weirdly climactic battle between a now monsterfied Ruka and some totally random other cop girl with a naginata that hasn't been in the movie before now. Monsterfied Ruka by the way has her right arm replaced with one of those specialized cutesy wrist cutting tools from the commercial, but giant. We cut away from that halfway through for awesome mad scientist cop apparently having kidnapped someone from a Meido Cafe and cutting off all her fingers to decorate a cake. And for Chief Samurai Cop Samurai to be shown de-masking Voldo to reveal, like, a Bladerunner Replicant. Silver hair, weird black stripe across the eyes, that whole look. And then he, well, you know, doesn't get his penis bit off. Well, I guess he might, but the camera cuts away before reaching that point in the proceedings. Uh... some random lady removes some cops face with a broken wine bottle. Like, she jams it on there and sucks, killing him, then blows out leaving a nice neat cop-face lying on the floor. Then getting back to the fight scene here, Ruka disarms Naginata Girl and then without removing her shirt or anything, just kinda squeezes her boobs to shoot out two streams of acid-milk across the courtyard that reduces her to a really silly skeleton. Wow. And again, the main character did this. Oh, and I only JUST now noticed that the samurai cop cars have little pagoda roofs stuck to the tops of'em. That's awesome. Anyway, as far as I can tell, this movie really doesn't actually have any plot at this point. We fully resolved everything like 5 or 10 minutes ago, and now it's just a pointless violence montage for the heck of it. Oh wait, no, now we're getting all pensive and remorseful. At least Ruka is. The cops age going yeeha and drawing and quartering bottle girl. And for some reason THAT scene gets actually realistic levels of gore, which are way nastier to see than the crazy blood geysers we've been seeing this whole time. See, there's this little known rule about inverse proportionality between offensiveness and blood pressure. So, you know, RUKA ANGRY! 4 cop heads fly off into the sky.
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Now here's ...um. What? OK, let me rewind that and be sure. Yup. Yup. That's what I'm seeing. OK, we've got a Chinese guy in a silly hat sitting around with his friend who is SO TOTALLY one of those black fu manchu sporting conehead dudes from The Never Ending Story. I kid you not. And they're sorting out a huge pile of severed limbs when Ruka charges through it, riding atop one of these awesome cop cars, with her left arm replaced with that crab-demon hand my main man from L5R was sporting for a set there before he ripped it off and replaced it with the jade hand. So they shoot her in the eye, but being a monster now, she grows a new one terminator style, kills them both by removing very bizarrely specific hunks of their heads, and goes after Chief Samurai Cop Samurai.
Oh, but first, we have to get past his dragon (in the TV tropes sense, you know, the tough freak the main bad guy has because the main bad guy is just some dude), the totally awesome mad scientist. And how awesome is he? He has Rocket Punch. I am serious. Dude build some kind of crazy cartoonish giant six shooter which launches severed human fists. I love this man and support all of his endeavors. Ruka dodges most of these, but one hits her square in the forehead, and, you know, bounces off and makes her go "ow." I mean, it's not by any means an EFFECTIVE weapon. It's just awesome is all. The next one chokes her though, and then while she's trying to deal with it, he fires six more, which are all giving her the finger and I AM SO NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP, to counter them, she has her monster hand extend a long tongue, which manages to catch them all just so, swinging them around 180 degrees, to launch back at him. He is stabbed by half a dozen middle fingers, one of which manages to knock aside his eye patch, demonstrating that he isn't missing an eye, eye patches are just cool. He screams "I... got... the point!" and dies. But man, what a way to go!
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OK, so yeah, here's the real dragon. Voldo with swords attached to all his stumps. Actually this uh... this doesn't really come off as all that threatening either. He's having a really really hard time holding his balance trying to cross the floor balanced on sword points... oh OK, NOW he's breaking into all the crazy galloping and bouncing off the walls you'd expect... and oh hey? Is that a big red plastic bra? Voldo has boobs? Is this... canonically Priss from Bladerunner as some kind of super-gimp-ninja? That actually makes ENTIRELY too much sense as a theory. I think it might, seriously, honestly be the case here. Wow. Oh, and there was a fight scene in there, and it was pretty weird. Anyway, Chief Samurai Cop Samurai gives a big speech which kinda works in context, but he did KINDA just say "I have no sympathy for rape victims!" in almost those exact words... which is a weird thing to toss into a moral high ground speech. She counters with, oh yeah, I've totally been turned into a hideous demonic monster, but I'm still a cop! Then he injects some magical movie steroids and grows to a height of 4 or 5 meters... and... oh. The camera just zoomed out. It's much weirder. His legs separated at the upper thigh with the stumps becoming rockers he's using to fly around the room. She yanks him down with her arm--tongue-hookshot, "It's time for you, to RETIRE!" Then she salutes his corpse with her monster hand. Then we get another police recruitment commercial. Actually, it's just the first one again, it goes all film warpy blearghy and rips to reveal a downright awesome final shot. OK, this is apparently the police force from this point on: One of those awesome cop cars. The main character in a cool new outfit, with monster arm, terminator eye and katana, and, are you ready for it? Boobs-Voldo with HUGE FRELLING AK-47-type-guns replacing all 4 limbs. Posing all quadruped style. Then we see Mind Bullets getting revived by having the top of his head getting put back on by... oh right. The schoolgirl hooker who was kinda killed off off-camera just after showing up at the very beginning of the movie who hasn't been mentioned or thought of since. Uh, yeah... Then we just get a big screen of red text: MORE GORE COMING SOON! And credits.
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Well. That was a journey. I think we honestly got the best of both worlds on this one. You get to hear me rambling incoherently about the /b/ club and Chief Samurai Cop Samurai, and honestly if you block out the /b/ club scene which, you know, you do. Brains have self-defense systems like that. That was actually a really enjoyable and funny movie. I laughed out loud. At scenes where I was clearly expected to. I mean, the visual style of the whole police force ALONE is worth the mental trauma inflicted here. And I really do have a game in the works for which I needed some samurai cop motifs to play off. Seriously though, the whole movie is pretty much nonstop hilariously awesomely insane scenes, broken up by 2 or 3 standard post-Matrix sword fighting scenes that, you know, I guess may also still hold appeal to some people. And I mean, the mad scientist's ultimate weapon! Come on! Show me something more amusing! I dare you! Going to be real hard narrowing down the screens to use on this one, I'll tell you that much. Even with me running way over length by pausing it to explain the whole chair bit.
By the way, just throwing this out there? Trailers include a live action Devilman... which is just like, 10 seconds of 2 naked dudes with oppositely aligned wings having a mid-air fight scene and a release date. Come to think of it, I need to watch Devilman some time don't I. Back to basics for this feature!
