Tokyo Gore Police

Rating: ***

The manic insanity unleashed by Tokyo Gore Police is mostly just too good to ignore. But mostly, I’d love to see the fake blood budget for this movie; I’d swear that more of the stuff was spilled in the first ten minutes than in the entire Friday the 13th series. Damned if I know what’s going on half the time, but it’s magically gory in a way that the name barely implies. Filled with over-the-top effects and confused, sometimes desperately different story elements, Tokyo Gore Police comes across as a mix of Blade Runner, Dawn of the Dead, and Resident Evil. And it’s all done in that exuberant Japanese-style and go-for-broke attitude.

If you’ll remember this little Kurt Wimmer film from a couple of years ago called Ultraviolet, then you’ll quickly see that TGP is a blood-soaked, Hellraiser-reinforced, purposefully campy little cousin of that floater. In the not too distant future in Tokyo, the police are on the brink of being privatized and self-mutilation is a fad where in “cute cutters” are advertised on television for stylish wrist cutting. There are also monsters called “engineers” running around, genetic anomalies that are transformed by a key-like tumour that allows them to replace missing limbs with some kind of organic weapon. Like a missing hand becomes pray mantis like claw, or a stripper’s sawed off bottom half becomes a crocodile-like maw.

And if you think missing a limb and having it turn into some kind of deadly, organic weapon of a perverse and grotesque nature, that’s to say nothing of the people that lose a piece of anatomy that’s a little more precious, let’s say. I hope I’m painting the right picture here, but even then this thing will surpass anything resembling you’re expectations when I use the term “gore-gasm.” You know, what is laughingly referred to as arterial spray in the whole Crazy 88’s fight in Kill Bill happens with alarming frequency in this film. Anytime something gets cut off, the (fake) blood gushes like a geyser that’s been five years behind in its discharges.

But if the idea of watching more blood and guts that a day at a slaughter house could provide is less than appealing to you, I guess you can enjoy the… uh, what else is in this movie? Well, there are the trials and tribulations of master engineer hunter Raku (Eihi Shiina), who saw her father gunned down in all its head-exploding glory and manages to track both the murder of her dad and the origin of the engineers to the same place. Okay, so it’s not exactly The Maltese Falcon here, and anytime blood isn’t pouring out of some poor victim’s gaping wound, things seem to slow to a crawl. But, oh well, no big deal because there’s always more blood-letting just around the corner.

Other than that, there’s really not much more to say about Tokyo Gore Police. It’s the type of movie where the dissolves are blood spraying all over the camera and covering the screen in a syrupy red mess. If that sounds like your particular brand of vodka, than march on over to the video store and put down your money on this well-made piece of exploitation cinema. However, it must be reinforced, if not implied already, that this is not for the squimish. Shoot, it isn’t even for the one with the average-strengthened stomach. Chainsaw hands, laser-blasting phalluses, S&M chicks with no limbs wearing a gas mask, there’s something truly perverse about the mind of filmmaker Yoshihiro Nishimura. And the world definitely deserves to share in it.

Shutter

Rating: **

If you’ve seen The Ring One and Two as well as The Grudge One and Two, plus The Messenger, Pulse, Dark Water and One Missed Call, then you’re probably going to see what’s coming with Shutter. Now the original Shutter was a Thai-made film released in 2004, as opposed to the others which were all J (meaning Japanese)-horror, but the fact of the matter remains these films all trade in a similar thematic and stylistic storytelling techniques. Consistency is fine, but a problem exists when you’ve repeated yourself so many times it gets stagnant. It happened to 80s slashers, it happened to the post-iconic 90s and it’s happening now with torture porn.

In Shutter, another newly married couple gets caught up in another ghost story. Ben (Joshua Jackson) and Jane (Rachel Taylor) are on their honeymoon in Japan when, while driving down a lonely stretch of road, Jane thinks she’s hit a young woman. There is no evidence to show that anyone was hit other than Jane’s word and the fact that the ghostly image of the same woman is now turning up on every photograph the couple takes. The clue is spirit photography; ghosts talking through pictures, and the ghost of the girl Jane thinks she ran over has a heck of story to tell as soon as Jane puts all the clues together.

This is one of those movies where I become obsessed with a nitty-gritty detail that sort of draws out my obsessive-compulsive bug. In this case it’s the fact that everybody seems to be using film cameras. Now if you know your spirit photography lore, than you are already fully aware of the fact that this phenomenon only appears on a picture that requires some kind of physical means of rendering a photograph. Thus it does not work with digital cameras. But what does everybody have now-in-days? Digital cameras.

So immediately we have an inherent contradiction at the basic nucleus of the film. Now I know a couple of photographers and unless it’s a special request from a client or a personal artistic project, they never use film anymore; they’re more or less 100 per cent digital. But what does Jackson’s professional photographer use? Oh yeah, you better believe it’s film. And what does the professional photographer at their weeding have? If you said film, you’re right. And what type of camera does Jane have? Well… she actually has a little pocket digital. But can she pick up ghostly images on it? You better believe she can.

If there’s one thing I can say for Joshua Jackson as an actor it’s that I can’t see him without thinking of his iconic role as Pacey Witter on Dawson’s Creek, which is a step up from when he started out on the Creek and all you could think about was The Mighty Ducks. In Shutter he’s kind of wooden and stilted, which is kind of the pace of the film but that doesn’t mean that the people have to be. Rachel Taylor is perhaps best known for her small part in Transformers last summer, but she won’t get a boost from this. The put upon wife is a thankless role as it is, and Taylor isn’t given much to do aside from looking concerned.

Shutter does earn a few points for trying to make things a little twisty at the end, but frankly I was unconvinced by it. It was a bad Scooby Doo ending although I did find the film’s final image a little leeringly creepy. (How apropos!) But this only came after nearly two hours of sitting through all the conventions and tactics of every one of the movies I listed at the top. Which are really, in actuality, the only ghosts that are haunting this thing in the end.