TOKYO GORE POLICE (a review)

TOKYO GORE POLICE (a review)

WTF??? If you are looking for weird, bloody, over the top violence in a strange silly way and tons of strange, bizarre, strange...uh...weirdness, then this is the movie for you.


The story: (with help from Wiki) set in the future in Japan where the police force is privatized, a young girl, Ruka, helps the police hunt down engineered people -- people who have been DNA-altered so that whenever they get hurt they grow a weapon and go on a rampage. The person changing them is the "Key Man" and to kill these people you have to cut out a key shaped tumor that is inside each of them. Eventually Ruka meets the Key Man and kills him after learning that his father was also killed unjustly and in fact they are both looking for the same man because the same man ordered both kills -- he ordered the Key Man's father to kill Ruka's father and then had the Key Man's father killed. So now Ruka goes after the man who started all this.

Was it good?

Wow. Words like "good" and "bad" just don't seem to apply. This movie is so over the top strange...and I'm usually good for a big dose of strange, but this was even weird for me. From the over the top violence to people growing weapons to fetish clubs to flashbacks to suicide commercials to everything else. It was an overload of strange. But I'm a multitasker and a subtitled movie with lots of weird can lose me and this one definitely did. Usually when I get lost in a movie I ask myself if it was good enough to make me want to go back and watch it more closely. Here, the answer is no. All the weirdness and violence might be cool if I were in the right mood but I still want more of a story -- something with some emotion. And here, beside the revenge thing, which I'm not into -- I just got the feeling that nothing was there. And for all the satire (commecials with smiling school girls selling suicide instruments), I'm not exactly sure what is being satirized. Again and again, I just didn't connect.

*** NOT RECOMMENDED ***