Review for Tokyo Gore School

Introduction

With a title like Tokyo Gore School, you can be forgiven for having certain expectations from this latest live action offering from Manga Entertainment. After all, director Yohei Fukuda is responsible for Chanbara Beauty, with its babes, blades and zombies. He also worked as cinematographer on Grotesque, the film that the BBFC outright rejected last year, so I was envisaging death and dismemberment in a school faculty, mayhem and carnage on an academic scale, and the horror of PE teachers being brought back from the dead… Or the horror of PE teachers full stop. But I have to say that I was disappointed by Tokyo Gore School. Although it's a good disappointment, as I loathe zombie movies.


Hayato Fujiwara has it sweet at high school. He's popular, he's smart and successful, and he's the president of the student body, the likeable and friendly face of the children in his school. Except that he has a rather mercenary philosophy towards life. There are either winners or losers, and he's one of the winners. The losers are just there to be bullied and pushed around, and they deserve whatever they get. So when right in front of him the school bullies led by Todoroki are pushing around the likes of wimpy Sanada, he isn't going to lift a finger to help. Except now his philosophy is about to be tested to destruction. Heading home from school, he suddenly finds that he's being pursued by a bunch of kids from many different schools, including his own. He's been entered into the Game. His mobile phone has been hacked, and it now holds his personal details, and a secret. The aim of the game is to collect students' phones to accrue points. Get enough points and you can delete your data, including the embarrassing secret. Lose your phone and your secret gets revealed to everyone. Every kid has a mobile phone, and every kid has some secrets that they don't want revealed, whether it's the fact that their mother sews nametags in their underwear, or something more sinister. Fujiwara has a secret that he doesn't want revealed under any circumstances, so he'll have to play to win. Only this game has no rules, and it's about to turn nasty. Bullying season is open.

The Disc

Tokyo Gore School gets a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer, although with the thin black bars top and bottom, I'd say it's more a 1.9:1. It's a digitally shot movie, so expect a degree of softness and overexposed whites. But it is clear and relatively sharp throughout, and the most important thing is that it's a PAL transfer, meaning there's none of the ghosting, and certainly none of the indications of interlacing that so plague standards conversions. The sole soundtrack is a DD 2.0 Japanese track, with optional English subtitles. The dialogue is clear, and the action sequences get some nice themes to drive the pace along. Other than a pleasant animated menu, the disc is free of extra features.

Conclusion

That was a nice surprise. Rather than delivering on zombies, random bloodletting, meaningless carnage, and viscera in the school halls, Tokyo Gore School has something of a more satirical bent to it, using its well crafted tale of societal breakdown to pass comment on modern day ills like teenage delinquency, cyber bullying, and social hierarchies. It's in the same vein as Lord of the Flies and Battle Royale, a case of people reverting to their more base instincts in the face of adversity. Of course when it comes down to it, it's about teenagers hunting each other down, and trying to despatch each other in various inventive ways, and there's plenty of action, fighting, and bloodletting. Although not quite as much as you would think, and really only to begin with.


Tokyo Gore School is very much hampered by its budget and low production values. There's plenty of free running chase sequences, but this is ground level free running, hopping fences and clambering up and down low walls. It's certainly not the skyscraper dodging antics of high budget productions. Also, the fights, while staged well, aren't particularly inventive, and there certainly isn't the bloodbath that the 'Gore School' moniker implies. The death count in this movie remains firmly in the single digits, while the effects are cheap and cheerful and also kept to a minimum. This isn't a film drowning in arterial spray as many similar films are wont to do. Of course to go with the b-movie budget, and the b-movie effects, we have some decidedly b-movie acting, the weakest point of the film. Too often the performances are either unbelievable, or totally overplayed, and while it is possible to forgive low production values, if the acting isn't up there then the film quickly falls down.


That's a shame, because Tokyo Gore School has a couple of gems when it comes to ideas. The game itself is a great idea, brilliantly thought up and executed, tying modern technology into a cyber bullying tournament in an explicit way, where the mobile phone becomes a prize to be fought for, as well as a tool of humiliation. The rules of the game are quite ingenious, and the cruelty of the participants quickly comes out under pressure. Everyone has a secret to hide, and it becomes clear pretty quickly what lengths people are willing to go to, to protect what objectively may be fairly innocuous bits of personal information.


The film also has a lot to say on the topics of cyber bullying, of the way teenagers relate to each other, on how the older generation relates to teens, and on the simple philosophies that define how teenagers think about the world. It starts out really strongly with these ideas in mind. It's just that the further into the film we get, the more muddled these ideas become, the more they fade into the background, until all that is left is a rather simple revenge tale, and the mechanics of the game itself. Other than a wry moment or irony at the very end, the film completely loses its satiric bite.


Tokyo Gore School is a passable film, a well paced and entertaining action movie, if low on production values and actors of ability, but it fails to deliver on what it promises when it comes to anything other than the basics. It's a poor man's Battle Royale, and if you have that film at hand, there's no reason to watch this.