reviews: Chanbara Beauty & Tokyo Gore Police

Good evening blogsphere,

I've got another review tonight of two movies I've been meaning to watch for awhile now: Tokyo Gore Police, and Chanbara Beauty. Before you start thinking it, yeah this is supposed to be a blog about me and my comic work, but what can I say: I don't own a computer of my own at the moment. So since I've got the time on my hands, I might as well write about something I'm doing right?

So yeah, I'm a big fan of J-movies and all things asian in general (Isn't it weird that I want to be a comic writer, and watch japanese movies? :p), and I've been waiting to see Tokyo Gore Police for awhile now. Chanbara Beauty was sort of a "why not", as it's based on a video game series over there, but strangely enough the movie is tolerable in the bounds of such (fancy that America? then again Silent Hill wasn't bad was it...oh wait, that was supervised by the Japanese too ^-^).

So Chanbara Beauty, a zombie flick based on a video game series. If you're watching movies to be cultured and such, stay very, very far away from this one; not that you can't see it coming a mile away. I can understand being misled by the title; but if you see the box art with the girl in a cowboy hat and bikini brandishing a katana with glamour lighting, and still expect this to be a thoughtful romance, do the world a favor and drown in a cup.

Overall this isn't all that great. The main character Aya is a daughter of some assassin clan, who's out for revenge against her little sister Saya for killing their dad. That and helping some crazy doctor overrun the entire world with zombies. Oddly enough this movie takes itself seriously, so you really have to watch it for action's sakes, or be a weirdo and laugh at the carnage (guilty as charged -_-) It's got some cool fight scenes, but the movie is entirely humorless, and for something like this you just can't afford to be.

Onward!

Tokyo Gore Police! Once again, if you watch this looking for a sensitive drama about a police woman and her aging father, just bury your head somewhere till you can't breath anymore (last joke like that I promise).

The story is that the Tokyo Police have been privatized to take on these crazy monster psychos called engineers. These guys have some serious body mods, as their wounds turn into weapons; (no seriously, a guy gets his face scratched and sprouts gun eyes after tearing off half his head from the teenie wound!) impervious to normal weapons (it seems at least, there's some discrepancy with that...), the only thing that can kill these guys is sheer badass, in the form of Ruka, a katana carrying cutter who takes no prisoners. She hunts the engineers in honor of her late police father (who's fate we see unfold/explode at the beginning), who's killer remains a mystery...

So this movie is pure awesomeness, very much like the Machine Girl last year (they both came out at the same time, so why do we get this one so late?), gore out the yin yang, and violence so ridiculous you can't help but laugh. It's the best parts of a Troma flick with a dash of Paul Verhoven's Robocop; meaning that it knows it's a b flick and embraces it, while entertaining the hell out of you.

Also, for the j-inclined, this was done by the same guy that did Meatball Machine, so you'll see more than a few actresses, props and characters from his works. Meatball Machine wasn't his best though...

All in all it's been a good night for movies on my end, hopefully I'll have time to watch more stuff like this later. For now it's adieu.

p.s. - If anyone knows where I can find Happy Negative Chainsaw Edge streaming, please let me know ^^