Cinephemera

I’m no stranger to Asian gore flicks. I’ve seen a few (Riki-Oh, The Machine Girl) and I’ve also seen Peter Jackson’s early work so I came into this thinking I’d already seen it all when it comes to gore.

Oh how wrong I was. There is literally nothing that can prepare you for this two-hour, visual onslaught on your gag reflex. Within the first five minutes a head is exploded, there’s cannibalism, a woman slashing her wrist to ribbons, the screen is soaked with blood, an arm is dismembered and there’s pressure hose bleeding. At that point I thought, “Okay. This is what the rest of the movie is going to be like.”

Wrong!

30 seconds later, a man regrows his severed arm into a fleshy chainsaw and another guy is then decapitated by it. Even this did not adequately prepare me for what I was watching.

Among the other events that happen on screen is a guy has gun barrels for eyes, a girl squirts acid from her breasts, a woman is ripped into four quarters by cars, a man’s face is cut off in a perfect circle by a broken bottle, a gun shoots dismembered fists, a man is impaled by four of these flying fists giving the finger, a man’s amputated leg stumps become blood jets that propel him around a room, a quadruple amputee walks around on her elbow and knee joints in an S&M costume and later attaches swords to these limbs and even later, machine guns.

And then there’s a scene about an hour into the movie that is so… I’m not really sure how to adequately describe it. Picture a collaborative project between David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne (Jacob’s Ladder) and then you’ll get just an inkling of an idea of what this scene is like. I’m still not sure if what I was watching was really happening.

If you’re a fan of over-the-top, Asian gore cinema, this is made (with love and gallons of blood) especially for you. It is no exageration to say that this is the strangest and goriest film I’ve ever seen. So thank you Tokyo Gore Police for opening my eyes to the heights of Asian gore cinema. Now let’s see the sequel top this.

That ain’t kool-aid coming out of his arms