Starring Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Yukihide Benny, Ikuko Sawada and Shun Sugata. Written by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Kengo Kaji. Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and produced by Yoko Hayama, Yoshinori Chiba and Satoshi Nakamura for Nikkatsu/Tokyo Shock.

In a dystopian future Tokyo, where the police department has become privatised and very fascistic, the city is threatened by criminals known as engineers, who are infected with DNA-altering key-shaped tumours, enabling the villains to mutate if their bodies are wounded. Ruka (Shiina), an ‘engineer hunter’ cop, attempts to deal with these mutant maniacs, but her problems multiply when she has to tackle the police department too, after the Police Commissioner General leads his men on a berserk rampage of wanton killing.

Director Yoshihiro Nishimura, who was also the Special Effects Director, Gore Effects & Creature Designer and Editor, ensures that TOKYO GORE POLICE is over the top throughout. Even the way Ruka gets herself to the highest floor of a building is preposterous: she uses a rocket launcher to fly up there! And then she immediately battles a maniacal engineer with a chainsaw embedded in his mutated arm!

The lead engineer, known as Keyman (Itao), operates sometimes like a black-gloved, giallo-style murderer, skewering a prostitute with hollow tubes, collecting her blood in bottles, then chopping her up and placing her parts neatly in a box, next to her clothing. Keyman later yanks off the top of his own head, revealing an exposed brain and two metal tubes where his eyes should be. From these twin barrels he starts shooting flesh projectiles at Ruka!

Cronenberg-style body horror ensues as Keyman inserts one of the key-tumours into Ruka’s arm, causing her forearm to split open lengthways. Ruka, though now an engineer, remains a focused policewoman and is unwavering as she decides to take on the out of control cops led by the Commissioner General, who she finds out was the man who arranged for her father to be assassinated years ago, because he opposed the privatisation of the cops.

Spasms of blood and gore abound, as does extraordinary imagery, including: acid-spraying breasts, a living flesh chair that projectile-urinates over a fetish crowd, a shot-up engineer prostitute with a lower half transformed into an enormous pair of reptilian jaws, and an infected policeman’s gigantic, red, prehensile mutant phallus that can shoot people! And these aren’t the only outrageous elements that this Japanese movie possesses, there’s also a mutated girl dressed up to resemble a snail, an amputee gimp woman with katana blades extending from her stumps, a strange, multi-barrelled weapon that fires human hands, and the main cop bad guy who manages to fly through the air thanks to the power of the blood-jets gushing from his leg-stumps!

Eihi Shiina plays it straight as the utterly earnest cop, who continues doing her duty even when one of her hands transforms into a tooth-filled maw and her left eye turns into a multi-orbed fleshy-growth. She really fits the part and always looks great, whether posturing on top of her police cruiser with her gnarly mouth-hand, or when she hacks off the hands of a sexual predator with a sword and casually walks away with her parasol lifted, avoiding the rain of blood gushing from the groper’s severed wrists.

The film is told in a more conventional way compared to the director’s later release HELLDRIVER, but this is still crammed with outrageous visuals, including numerous public advertisements for self-harm, and ultra-gore in abundance.

TOKYO GORE POLICE is as mad as a box of frogs and glories in its bloody weirdness throughout.