Tokyo Gore Police 1.5 review
MiRSD | 09/16/2010
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I'll start off by saying I loved Tokyo Gore Police. I wrote a review for that in the "Tokyo Gore Police" DVD section.
However, Tokyo Shock has re-released it with a bonus disc of follow-up short films, calling it "Tokyo Gore Police 1.5". I actually looked all over for more information on it and came up empty. Hopefully if you're in the same situation, this review will help.
I will say that I'm very annoyed with Tokyo Shock's marketing of these.. they release a title, sell them and then a couple months later re-release it with bonus content, basically "screwing" anyone who purchased it previously. They released 3 versions of "Machine Girl" and 2 of "Tokyo Gore Police" so far (generally doubling in price over the previous release). Since there are no special features on Tokyo Gore Police, I can imagine them releasing that a third time as well.
But for more info on TGP, check out the reviews on that DVDs page: Tokyo Gore Police
TGP 1.5 is the same disc as before, but now includes a second disc of "follow-up short films, extending the TGP Cinematic experience".. I don't know about that, but that's how they market it. It's basically a disc of ~45 minutes worth of short films (and a recap of the TGP movie). These are all very low-budget short films (a few minutes each) or commercials, and not of the same standard the movie was made with. I didn't enjoy these nearly as much as I had wanted to, and will likely not re-watch them. I can honestly not recommend anyone who had already purchased the previous release to "upgrade" to this (as I did), and for those purchasing for the first time, it's up to you whether the 1.5 bonus disc is worth about double the cost of the film itself. It's nice to have, don't get me wrong, but it seems like they just wanted to have fun and threw together a few short movies over a weekend. One of them is actually very good, and similar to the movie, but the rest I didn't care too much for.
Also of note, the video on the short films is non-anamorphic (meaning on a widescreen TV, it will have black bars on the top, bottom, left and right of the screen). The 4 star score is for TGP. The short films get about a 2.5."