This past Friday I could've seen any number of new movie releases. From families to hipsters to atheists to right-wingers to blind people, Hollywood shoveled a whole lotta shit into the multiplexes this week pandering to any number of social groups. But why just go back to McDonald's again for my six-millionth grease soaked burger bun with unidentifiable gray patty substance that they're trying to pass off as a double cheeseburger when, for a little more effort, I could stroll ten blocks further and get a mouth soaking slab of grilled beef with a side of bitchin' sweet potato fries in a meal that will not only leave my taste buds twitching pleasantly in the afterglow, but won't give me a bout of explosive diarrhea an hour later. All this talk of flame-broiled greatness and deliquesced bovines (be my valentine thesaurus.com) reminds me why I shouldn't write reviews on an empty stomach... Anyway, having missed my chance to see TGP back in June at this year's New York Asian Film Festival, the Evil Dead Bride and I (and her “best born again Christian friend EVER”) celebrated her birthday with the movie's premiere showing at the Two Boots Pioneer indie theater in SoHo. I try to avoid the apex of hipster jackassetry that is SoHo like an AIDS ravaged crack whore with a colostomy bag in one hand and a straight razor in the other, but sometimes you've gotta travel deep into enemy territory to get those sweet potato fries... easy stomach... soon as I'm done here, I'll get back to filling you with tater tots, fried cheese and Steak-umms™.

When Ruka (demented death dealing Audition darling Eihi Shiina) was a little girl she looked up to her dad as most daughters do. As one of the top cops of the Tokyo Police Department, he was a sterling example of good for his little girl to aspire to be herself one day. Well, that was a long time ago... before dad's brains got splattered all over downtown. Years later and Ruka's taken up her pop's mantle, joining the TPD to help fight the bad guys on the streets. This ain't her daddy's TPD though. In the time since his cranial explosion, Tokyo's law enforcement has become much more heavy duty and militaristic in their methods. Think Dominion Tank Police, only, uhm, without the tanks. The TPD's also become privatized, meaning that a corporation is now responsible for keeping an eye on crime... which is like putting a pedophile in charge of a preschool. If this sounds familiar to you, you've probably just come through a time warp from 1987, where you were leaving a theater after having just finished watching Robocop for the first time. That might also be why all of TGP goofy commercials and TPD public service announcements feel familiar too. Don't ask me how to get back to your own time though. I'll give ya Christopher Lloyd's address. Maybe he's still got a little of that Doc Brown magic in him... or you could just try doing the Time Warp... really fast... and in one of those Jiffy-Pop zombie jumpsuits from The Chilling... If nothing else, at least you'll finally have something to embarrass yourself and your family name with on YouTube!

The police aren't the only thing that's changed in the Tokyo of the future though. As a socio-cinematic example of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, the criminals too have gone to extremes to carve their own bloody niche in the new world, and HOT DAMN is it bloody! Thanks to a mysterious genetic key-shaped “tumor”, the average hoodlum can now become an “Engineer”. Not just content with running trains or designing shit, these Engineers have a bizarre ability of radical evolutionary mutation that causes violent physical trauma to sprout extreme hyper-natural defense mechanisms! Examples of such “mechanisms” include a giant box-cutter arm, cybernetic eyes, man-eating python arm, crocodile jaw legs, firearm eye-stalks, a retractable tentacle with a mounted chainsaw, and an elephant trunk penis gun... If nothing that I've just mentioned is enough to make you want to watch this movie, you should just close out of this window and never read another one of my reviews ever again.

The only way to stop the Engineers is by severing or removing the “tumor key” from their heads, and to help do this the TPD created a specific group to train in combat techniques designed to do just that, calling them Hunters. This is where Ruka comes in. When her daddy died, Ruka became the ward of the TPD's head chief, thus cementing her future as an officer of the (corporate sponsored) law. Training hard and taking her role seriously, she has since become the department's lead hunter, celebrating over 50 notches in her Engineer hunting belt and getting rewarded for her efforts with a shiny new merit badge for her sash. Aw, how cute. Despite trying to lose herself in her work (and developing an awesome method of transportation that uses rocket launchers to eliminate the need for stairs or elevators), Ruka is still haunted by the memory of her father's explodey head and still struggles to find the person responsible for it, at the same time dealing with an apparent wrist-cutting mental disorder she inherited from her mom. After much searching, back story exposition, abuse of power, bodily deformity, generic police drama intrigue, a sex club that reminds me in all the wrong ways of the snail people from Uzumaki (makes disturbing sense with Kengo Kaji on staff), and more gallons of blood's been sprayed across the screen than my ex-wife Liz Bathory sent down her bathtub drain over the course of a year, our heroine faces her final destiny... which includes an almost unstoppable canon that shoots disembodied fists (I know what's going to the top of my Cthulhumas list this year), a guy propelling himself Gamera style with gore spewing “rocket” legs, and a quadruple amputee who makes Cherry Darling look about as hardcore as taffy that's been sitting in direct sunlight all day.

Not especially original, TGP is a schizophrenic goregy™ (gore-orgy) of entertaining movie elements past. The commercials and PSAs bring to mind previous humerus ticklers from Paul Verhoeven flicks, while the extreme violence makes me think back fondly to the early brain babies of Peter Jackson, the bodily disfigurement reminds us all of the queasy feelings we got the first time David Cronenberg invited us onto his playground, and it's all glued together with the energy, action, and gross-out humor of Robert Rodriguez's non-family affairs. But, just because it's not exactly a new flavor of ice cream doesn't mean it's not special in its own right. After all, if you add peanut butter, fudge, and pretzels to everyday vanilla ice cream you get Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby: a new monster entirely that more than lives up to its name. TGP is the Chubby Hubby of Japanese cop action-dramadies. That doesn't mean it's a perfect movie though.

The finale seemed a little tame compared to the 70 or so minutes leading up to it, and I started to wonder if Nishimura has ADD during the middle as the focus shifts almost entirely away from Ruka to the point that I'd pretty much lost interest in what she was doing. I also don't feel like Shiina brought the kind of energy a character like Ruka should have. I understand that she's supposed to be emotionally tormented to an extent, especially given her “cutter” mentality, but she just seems so deadpan and out-of-place with the rest of the flick. Is she supposed to provide a grounding for the audience in contrast to the rest of the insanity going on around her? Is she supposed to be “strong” by being the only person in the movie who doesn't revel in perversion, violence and, I don't know, laughter? For someone who cuts off a citizen's hands because he's a subway serial groper, she comes off as, well, boring I guess.

To end everything on the proverbial high note though, there are a lot of shots that work so well you'd think they were put together by German automotive engineers. One shot in particular involves the aforementioned hand dismemberment scene as Ruka walks away slow-mo style from her screaming victim with a parasol over her head and the blood pours down like red rain. It's hilarious to watch, but it's also such a well setup shot that when you stop laughing you can't help but notice it. And the music? Damn. The music throughout TGP isn't just good, it's perfect. It's so perfect that it makes Mr. Perfect look like Mr. Magoo. Yeah, I said it. Feel that tingle in your toes? Fucking 'A'... for AWESOME. Further awesome-nicity? The ending literally promises us that there's more gore to come. MORE GORE TO COME! It's like a skunk ape with a boom box.