TOUCHING TERROR: Eihi Shiina
by MARK SLUTSKY
Has there ever been a movie title that screams Fantasia more than Tokyo Gore Police? It’s almost like it was named by an automated Fantasia title generator: random Asian city + random disgusting thing + random genre film trope. And if you think the title is evocative of Montreal’s beloved and blessedly bizarre genre festival, which opens this week and turns 12 this year, well, wait till you see the movie itself.
Set in the Japan of the not-too-distant future, the, uh, gore police of the title are the men and women of the Tokyo Police Corporation, the newly privatized wing of law enforcement. The Corporation is at war with “Engineers”—criminals who seem normal enough at first, until they’re injured, wherein their wounds somehow become bio-mechanical weaponry. The force’s best Engineer hunter is Ruka (Audition’s Eihi Shiina), a melancholy woman with a tragic past; she’s haunted by the unsolved death of her father, who was murdered in front of her when she was a child.
As Shiina investigates the mystery of the Engineers, she discovers links to her own curious past. She also discovers a lot of really disgusting stuff. Yes, this is one movie that absolutely delivers on its title. Tokyo? Check. Police? Of course. Gore? Oh, so much gore.
Whether we’re talking guns bursting out of fresh bullet wounds, a blow job gone terribly, terribly, terribly wrong or countless other hilarious atrocities, Tokyo Gore Police is a bloody, magnificent gross-out. It’s no surprise when you look at the career of director Yoshihiro Nishimura—who’s also credited here for gore effects and creature design, as well as editor and special effects editor. Though Tokyo Gore Police is the second feature he’s directed, he’s got a long list of credits for special effects, make-up and production design on other productions.
Shock and satire
The experience clearly helped, because for all of its effects and elaborate make-up, Tokyo Gore Police was shot in two short weeks. “We planned everything in detail,” he says. “Still, it was very hard to do 1,700 shots in just two weeks, averaging more than 100 shots per day. I announced to the staff ‘Please be prepared to be raped by me (mentally).’ I suppose nobody knew exactly which scene they were shooting in the chaos and just followed what I ordered.”
“I knew from the start that there were many shots with very little time so I was determined to just do it,” says Shiina, also over e-mail. “Most of the action scenes didn’t have enough rehearsal time, so I had to be ready for just one take and I had to refresh myself before each shot.” But, she adds, “It was such a rare opportunity to do this kind of movie with so much special effects and props and I made up my mind to enjoy it as much as I could.”
Shiina pulls off a difficult performance with style here. In the midst of so much over-the-top insanity, Ruka manages to be a touching, believable character with real emotional weight, even when she’s blasting mutants. “Through many unreasonable incidents and battles, Ruka’s mental state was something I tried to keep as the core of this film,” she says. “Otherwise, the message of this film would not reach the audience, because there are many visually shocking scenes. If so, I did feel it would be meaningless. Ruka was alone yet strong and beautiful as a lull in the wind, and so was I when I played Ruka.”
And yes, there is a message. Tokyo Gore Police is absurd, but it uses its outrageousness strategically, satirically. Privatization and consumerism are its targets—the latter skewered via the parody ads that pop up throughout the movie, which are truly hilarious. (One involves a family using a device much like a Nintendo Wii to execute their daughter’s killer—truly dark, funny stuff.)
If anything, the film is reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, which took a similar approach to the same subjects. “I love both Robocop and Starship Troopers,” Nishimura says. “I don’t watch TV other than news programs, I don’t read anything but non-fiction books, though I have been reading Fangoria, Eiga Hihou, Uchusen and Cinefex since I was a child. So, I wanted to do social criticism with these concepts.”
And, for the record, he adds, “Wii is one of the things I want the most now. Though I have Xbox360. Dead Rising, U.S. version rocks!”
At the Hall Theatre
(1455 de Maisonneuve w.) on
Saturday, July 12, midnight
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CREATURE FEATURE: Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
by HILLARY BRENHOUSE,
LORRAINE CARPENTER,
MALCOLM FRASER, PATRICK
LEJTENYI, JEFFREY MALECKI,
MARK SLUTSKY and
CHRISTOPHER SYKES
Sukiyaki Western Django
The prolific, virtuosic and perverse Takashi Miike tries his hand at a Western in characteristically bizarre fashion. It begins with Quentin Tarantino hamming it up on an ultra-stylized set, then shifts to a more (relatively) conventional mode, with a lone gunman (Ito Hideaki) arriving in a town where two gangs fight it out over a legendary buried treasure. The Japanese cast speaks entirely in heavily accented English, making the dialogue occasionally hard to follow, but since it mostly consists of Western clichés, it all works out. The fun is in Miike’s genre-mashing, his visual ingenuity and the sheer boldness of the whole effort. (MF)
WILD WESTERN: Sukiyaki Western Django
Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
A low-budget Canadian horror film with a sense of humour, Jack Brooks gets serious credit for its excellent monster puppets and lack of CGI. Brooks (Trevor Matthews) is a plumber who’s grappled with anger management issues since he witnessed his family slain by a monster while on a camping trip as a child. When his night school teacher, Professor Crowley (Robert Englund of Freddie Krueger fame) begins transforming into something gross and evil, it’s up to our underachiever to turn his rage into something productive. A spirited horror comedy that dwells a little too much on back story elements and suffers from weak characterization—but there’s some neat monsters for sure. (MS)
TERROR TRILOGY: EpitaphEpitaph
Neither a remake nor a Ringu wannabe(which should be refreshing for Western and Eastern audiences), this Korean horror film is also novel for its period setting, during the Japanese occupation in the middle of WWII. Three stories are told in flashback by a onetime hospital intern in a mortuary where the dead don’t rest easy. Though the film is essentially divided into three parts, the stories overlap and intertwine cleverly but not cleanly, demanding the audience’s close attention. Not that that’s difficult to achieve with its abundant scares and disturbing twists—this ghost story is more than merely chilling. (LC)
REVENGE, NOT SO SWEET:
Who’s That Knocking at My Door?Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
The Korean revenge genre gets another entry here, with director Yang Hae-hoon serving up a sparse but ultimately compelling film about surfacing demons from adolescence. A young man bumps into his former tormentor and plots his destruction—but things, naturally, go horrifically wrong. Part love story, part commentary on the culture of cyber-vigilantism, the film’s cinematic style is reminiscent at times of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and Last Days. Not as taut as other Korean thriller classics like Oldboy or Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Who’s That is nevertheless a worthy debut. (PL)
SHAKY SCARES: [rec][REC]
Following in the footsteps of Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, this Spanish adrenaline rush is shot in the POV of a television cameraman who is quarantined inside an apartment complex after a mysterious disease ravages the residents. A gory and fast-paced thriller that will certainly have you squirming in your seat; fans of the zombie flick are bound to eat this one up. Sure, most of the dialogue is screamed rather than spoken and I’ve had just about enough of the shaky-cam but if you’re looking for a fright, you’ve met your match. (CS)
Time Crimes
Time’s arrow snakes about in this understated Spanish thriller when a man spies a girl undressing in the bushes near his new home and gets coaxed into an increasingly horrific nightmare. In the manner of Run Lola Run or Kieslowski’s Blind Chance, time folds back onto itself, thanks to a time machine, as a bewildered Hector (Karra Elejalde) must set things right in the past. The science is wisely glossed over in favour of a subtler story of doppelgangers and ethical dilemmas. And there are only four characters, which gives room for Hector to bumble about between determination and dumb luck. (JM)
ROCK THE CLOCK: Time CrimesBeautiful Sunday
A dramatic thriller packed with crime conspiracies, bloody batterings, confused personages and some serious Korean profanity, Jin Kwang Gyo’s Beautiful Sunday is twisted. In the first of the film’s two crisscrossed narratives, a desperate Detective Kang (Park Yong Woo) conspires with a local gang so that he can pay the mounting medical bills for his comatose wife. The second, especially dark and bizarre, follows an oddball (Nam Gung Min) whose loving wife finally discovers that he is the same man who raped her before they were married. Engaging, but also convoluted and sometimes hard to follow, the action ends when the strange storylines converge. (HB)
PROFOUNDLY PROFANE: Beautiful SundayThe Objective
At the height of the Afghan fighting in November 2001, a U.S. Special Forces team, led by a laconic CIA man, ventures into a no-man’s land on a mysterious mission, reputedly for propaganda and intelligence purposes. But nothing is at it seems in the wilds of the country’s south, and more danger than Taliban ambushes are at play. Directed by The Blair Witch Project’s Daniel Myrick, historical mysteries, eerie sounds from unknown sources and an ambiguous ending are signature hallmarks, used to good effect. Morocco’s harsh but breathtaking locale make for a backdrop as intimidating and powerful as the evil haunting the soldiers. (PL)
MYSTERIOUS MISSION: The ObjectiveThe Most Beautiful Night in the World
Perhaps the animated intro is a giveaway, but this isn’t one of those overtly wacky Japanese flicks where the breakneck bubblegum hits you like a hammer from the first frame. This film takes its sweet time revealing the mysteries of Kaname, a fishing village that was a dead-end backwater until a sudden and dramatic spike in its birthrate. It’s not exactly a sex comedy, or a family drama, or an anti-war film, but elements of each weave their way through what is essentially a charming, funny, heavy, dirty, lengthy little story full of geniuses, perverts and drunks (and innocent bystanders). (LC)
Idiots and Angels
Animator Bill Plympton is back with a warped fable of ne’er do wells and weirdos with extra appendages. In this case, wings mysteriously sprout from a hard luck alcoholic, and engage in a struggle for his body and soul. Plympton’s signature animation style—a painstaking process where each cel is drawn and painted by hand—is wonderfully expressive, a jerky and slap-shod affair that belies the production and suits the film’s whimsical logic. It does veer towards the sentimental at times, though this is more than compensated for by the twisted beauty and fantastic soundtrack. Highly recommended. (JM)
TWISTED BEAUTY: Idiots and AngelsLa Crème
Small budget independent cinema doesn’t have to be a pain to sit through based on production quality alone. It does help if you have a decent script, though. La Crème pits two unemployed salesmen against each other as they jockey over a single opening. The twist? One of them happens upon a facial cream that makes him irresistible to members of the opposite sex. Suddenly the job prospect isn’t the only thing on his mind. An utterly unoriginal idea that’s only made worse by shoddy acting and lack of chemistry between the leads. (CS)
Second Skin
For many players, the game title World of Warcraft can be taken literally; it’s an immersive universe they spend dozens of hours in a week, battling, hanging out, even wooing each other. Second Skin is a fascinating documentary that looks at the lives of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) fanatics. Some have found spouses and boon companions through online gaming; others have let the rest of their lives fall away. Some of the stories are heartbreaking, but the film does a good job at presenting a balanced profile of this very strange new phenomenon. Ultimately the filmmaking is a bit scatter-shot and perhaps tries to cover a little too much ground, but it’s an engrossing portrait of an emerging culture. (MS)
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