Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Jason goes to Holehead--the really real closing night

I was back at the Brava Theater last Sunday night, first for an encore screening of "Machine Girl". Nothing to add to my previous review. It's still a new cult classic, and it's even better the second time.

The real closing night event was the last minute festival addition of the west coast premiere of "Tokyo Gore Police" by the same guys (Tokyo Shock) who made "Machine Girl". This one is possibly bloodier and definitely much more fucked up (and yes, that's possible). In the future, the Tokyo police force is privatized. The heroine is a bad-ass cop, daughter of a cop who she witnessed murdered in a shocking opening. That's left her with a bit of a wrist-slashing habit, but she's also trained to be the baddest killer on the force. Her target--engineers. Not nerds who build stuff, not train drivers, but genetically altered freaks whose wounds turn into weapons unless you find the key-shaped tumor inside them and destroy it. Engineers are usually mindless adrenaline freaks, but the force is facing one that calm and meticulous in cutting up his victims. Worse yet, he implants a key tumor into the heroine, making her an engineer!

The look of the film owes an equal debt to "Blade Runner" and "Robo-Cop", and like the latter breaks the tension with hilarious mock commercials, both anti-suicide PSA's and pro-cutting cutesy fashion knives (WTF?)

This was already nearly the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. Then they got to the underground genetic modification fetish club--prostitutes with penis noses, protruding eyeballs, snail shells, and a flesh chair that gives the crowd a golden shower. Yep, this is the weirdest fucking thing I've ever seen that still made linear story sense.

And that was a great way to end Holehead 2008.

1 comment:

the 1st AD said...

hey thanks for the reviews and for telling us which to see and which to avoid. who won the awards at this fest?