Three laughs: Tokyo Gore Police

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart. 

★ or ★★★★★

 

Three Laughs Case File #43:
Tokyo Gore Police (Tōkyō Zankoku Keisatsu, Japan 2008)
Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura

We live at stressful times right now, so a way to make things feel a bit easier is to take some flights of fancy. Like, say, this Japanese film about a privaticed police that leads to major bloodbaths.... Wait, but it's more or less a parody of anime stylings and over-the-top violence in Japanese flicks in a way that's more reminiscent of Braindead with it's firehosing of actors with blood.

In future Tokyo, law-enforcement is left for companies and private entrepreneurs. One of the latter is Ruka (Eihi Shiina), a super-skilled katana-wielder, who's also after the persons who killed her policeman father. At the same time, odd body manipulations and mutations are all the rage in the underground. Someone is using these body-melt technologies to sprout biological weapons to kill cop company workers, though, so Ruka is off to find the culprit.

I came of age at the time where most of the coolness and edge of Asian action movies had started to wear off. But there were still some last gleamings in parodies such as this, which I first saw at my beloved Night Visions film festival. This, along with stylistically similar OTT gore films Meatball Machine and Machine Girl, were one of the starting points of independent studio Sushi Typhoon, with which Nishimura and fellow director Noboru Iguchi made a string of bad taste gore flicks, with diminishing returns. You can't keep up if even before starting the business you've already gone to 11. Still, they managed to fund some of Sion Sono's films as well before closing doors so it was all for art in the end. 

But at this point it was still odd and novel, inventive even, to do a sort of cross between RoboCop, Akira and Tetsuo. The film has its tongue firmly in cheek and offers plenty of surprises and cool practical effects so it has still stayed surprisingly fresh today. 

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The film begins with a lengthy action scene where Ruka faces off against a guy wielding a chainsaw on a chain. After this we get a pretty straightforward nod to Starship Troopers with a propaganda commercial showing the strength of privatized police forces, who execute a guy tagged to be a murderer of 15 childern on a rooftom by repeatedly shooting him like he's Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. A later commercial features a family using a Wii-like katana controller in order to perform remote executions as a kind of party game.

2. It takes a while to see just how gleefully perverted the movie is, but the auction scene is pretty hard to top in this regard. A cheerful crowd of punks and vampires is presented with a number of female dancers, each with a more bizarre mutilation. The snail-girl with her eyeballs in tubes is already pretty weird and disgusting but what takes the cake is the breathing half-woman-half-chair that squirts a lengthy pee to the faces of the ecstatic audience.

3. The main bad guy has a massive shotgun dick he uses to blast out police officers. That's it. That's the laugh.