Tokyo Gore School review (DVD) ★★

Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Masato Hyugaji, Takafumi Imai, Kenta Itogi, Shinwa Kataoka, Kohei Kuroda,
Shion Machida, Shoichi Matsuda, Masanori Mizuno | Written by Yohei Fukuda & Kiyoshi Yamamoto
UK Certification 18 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 109 minutes | Directed by Yohei Fukuda

Two things about Tokyo Gore School stick out like a sore thumb. The first is in its marketing: it's being hailed as a film from the director of the controversial horror Grotesque, one of two films the BBFC outright banned in 2009. Now, Yohei Fukuda was indeed involved in that production – he was a cinematographer – but that movie was both written and directed by Koji Shiraishi. Second of all, the title is extremely deceptive. This is not – I repeat – not anything to do with the bizarro splatter movie Tokyo Gore Police. It's not a sequel and it's absolutely nothing like that film. I can imagine just how many people are going to be fooled by that.

Tokyo Gore School is in fact about a Japanese high school that has been gripped by a violent new craze. Based on a nondescript social networking website, private details about students are posted online for all to see. Details that they do not want to be seen by just anyone. This is the motive for 'The Game', where teenagers rack up points for physically assaulting their peers, all with the objective of having their data removed from the profile network. The more points they score, the more information gets deleted. Students find each other using GPS on their mobile phones and, after beating someone into submission, they send an email from the victim's phone that kicks them out of the game and reveals their biggest secret. And there can only be one winner.

Once again contrary to the title, there is actually no gore in the film until the very end, where there is a rather tame, suitably J-cinema geyser of the red stuff, but that's it. If you're looking for a crazy neo-Asian horror with wild death scenes as the title suggests, you are not going to find it here.

But not to disparage the film entirely, I do find the concept interesting, though it is full of holes and requires you not to think deeper than what you're told on screen. It's a twist on the story Battle Royale told in the novel and subsequent film ten years ago, only without the excitement, tension and ultra-violence. While there is plenty of brutality in Tokyo Gore School, it's a film that's very restrained in its use of blood, so the violent scenes are mostly all disappointing, especially since they're badly shot and suffer from what I like to call Coronation Street fight choreography.

I'm giving the film two stars by scraping the barrel of my engrossment in the plot. With all its faults, there is still a perfectly decent movie in there somewhere, just waiting to be salvaged by a tighter, smarter script.

EXTRAS None.

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