Tokyo Gore Police

Last night was Tokyo Gore Police at the Circle Cinema Midnight Movie. This is a film I had seen once before, when I viewed the screener disk in preparations for designing the poster for the show.

TGP is one of a bizarre genre of slasher film, being the Japanese slasher film. This kind of film operates on the following conceits:

1. The body of every slashing victim must contain at least 200 gallons of blood, and possess the same high blood pressure as the offspring of a meth-addicted hummingbird and a fire hydrant.
2. The editors of these films not only have chronic A.D.D., but are also impervious to epileptic seizures.
3. Logic, Schmogic.
4. Plot, Schmlot.

I'm such a noob with these films. In fact, I still feel this kind of movie is part of a really fucked up collective effort on the part of the Japanese people to get back at us on a psychological level for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They may not have ever possessed the firepower to retaliate directly, so they're exporting their popular culture in a way that will scare us into never attacking them again.

In TGP, the story goes like this: In a not-too-distant future/alternate-timeline present day, the Tokyo police has been privatized, but the only type of crime being committed are hyper-frenetic attacks by beings know as "engineers", who can quickly regenerate any severed body parts, only the new parts somehow incorporate the weapons they were using. To put it another way, in the first scene, an engineer who was attacking the police with a chainsaw soon found his arm detached, and it grew back with it's own built-in chainsaw.

Expand and repeat that mental image to about two hours, and I give you Tokyo Gore Police. But wait, there's more! Also contained in this film are: The absolute worst-case punishment scenario for copping a feel on the subway, the worst blowjob ever shown on film, advertisements for products catering to self-mutilation, and (please try to wrap your head around this concept) a gun that shoots fists.

And it's all funny as hell. It's so over the top that it's impossible for anyone to imitate it in real life. Not that would matter, as any person who would take any of this shit remotely seriously has no doubt already shown enough warning signs of mental illness to have been locked up far away from society by now.

Obviously, it's not for everyone. But then again, this film could go the way of Two Girls One Cup, in that most people don't want to watch the movie itself, but would instead watch other people react to the film. I first questioned the idea to show this as a midnight movie, but after seeing it, it's precisely the kind of movie made for midnight. It's so fucked up, crazy and wild that it just doesn't work any other time of day.

So, strap in, have a sick bag handy just in case, unplug your brain and enjoy.