Film

No one can charge Nishimura with false advertising. This bit of Tarantino-meets-Verhoeven-meets-manga is set in Tokyo, it involves the police, and, oh Lordy, there’s gore aplenty. In the first five minutes, we are treated to loving pans across a mutilated body, a cop repeatedly slashing her wrist, and a chain-saw fight with a murderous mutant.

The privatized police of this near future battle “engineers,” humans modified so that when they are hurt, their wounds mutate into weapons. That leads to such thrills as seeing a guy get his dick bit off and then, when he’s mutated, sprout a huge fleshy penis-gun. Ruka (Shiina), a cop haunted by the death of her father, must hunt down the mad genius who is creating all these mutants. The color of this film is orangy red (from fountains of blood, lit in neon color), the camera placement is low and canted (the better to convey an off-kilter world), and the sound is the squelch of viscera being spilled.

In a nod to Verhoeven’s Robocop and Starship Troopers, Tokyo is peppered with ads for products like stylish wrist-cutting razors for little girls, meant to suggest a culture that has embraced violence. As in those films, the satire is intended to inoculate the film against its embrace of violence by framing the gore as a critique of our violent culture. But that’s just an alibi. The audience for this film isn’t looking for critique; it’s looking for blood porn. In Tokyo Gore Police, they’ll get it.