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.