TOKYO GORE POLICE (Japan, 2008)

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

100 minutes, digital projection, in Japanese with English subtitles
Directed by: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Starring: Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Yukihide Benny, Jiji Bu, Keisuke Horibe

This gleeful sci-fi destructo party mixes STARSHIP TROOPERS with ROBOCOP, then grafts the love child of Shinya Tsukamoto and David Cronenberg to its back, screaming with body horror, and douses itself in a waterfall of thick, bubbling gore. At the center of the maelstorm stands Eihi Shiina, who hasn’t been seen in a film since Takashi Miike’s 1999 masterpiece, AUDITION, torturing a poor salaryman for the crime of daring to love her. TOKYO GORE POLICE is a masterpiece (yes, we mean it!) full of filmic innovation, genre-busting weirdness and a desire to freak you out. Plus it's got a penis gun - our second one in two years!

Police officer Ruka (Shiina) is part of a special termination squad in the newly-established Tokyo Police Corporation, a privatized paramilitary force that maintains law and order through ultraviolence, sadism and streetside executions. Ruka carries a lot of scars, however, both inside and out. Her father, an old-fashioned neighborhood cop (familiar face Keisuke Horibe), was murdered in broad daylight by a mysterious assassin, and Ruka has dedicated her life to finding the killer. But in the midst of a new case she's been assigned to—the hunt for a shadowy mad scientist known simply as the "Key Man," who's behind the creation of a race of criminally insane mutations called "Engineers"—Ruka discovers clues to the identity of her father's killer. But these clues link her closely to the Key Man and his desire to remake the population into biomechanical piles of mad, murderous flesh.

Packed to its mutated gills with transgressive imagery, this flick knows just when to wink while chewing your head off with a crocodile vagina monster. Behind the camera are some of the most talented filmmakers to emerge from Japan in recent years. Co-writer Kengo Kaji was one of the writers of the brilliantly deranged UZUMAKI, and both of the other screenwriters (one of them director Nishimura) are past collaborators with mad genius Sion Sono, last year's guest for EXTE and the director of NORIKO'S DINNER TABLE, SUICIDE CIRCLE and STRANGE CIRCUS. But Nishimura's main chops are as a makeup artist and special effects designer on productions like MEATBALL MACHINE and AKANBO SHOJO (also showing in the NYAFF this year), and it shows in the attention he gives to the gloriously violent and gore-soaked effects sequences in the film, particularly a centerpiece fetish party.

Based on Nishimura's award-winning 1995 short "Anatomnia Extinction," this film is a miracle of execution - shot in just two weeks and at a pace that would kill lesser organisms. After viewing the endless army of latex oddities onscreen, you'll understand why that's such a jaw-dropping schedule. Spiced with precise doses of fight choreography by the versatile Tak Sakaguchi—responsible for the action in AZUMI and VERSUS, and who also appears in the film as the first Engineer the police encounter—and co-produced by New York City's own Fever Dreams / Media Blasters, TGP is possibly the goriest, craziest, most eye-blowing, chunk-spewing, urine-spraying, vagina-chomping, head-exploding sci-fi movie of all time. You are cordially invited to the North American premiere so that you may witness stage one in the destruction of our sanity.