Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack, where do I begin? After debating for two hours with a few beers in hand, the group of people I was relaxing with decided they wanted to tag along for a film which I described as likely to be F’d up and really weird. An ideal midnight movie if you will. So begins my adventure into the mind and directorial vision of Takayuki Hirao and the work of manga artist Junji Ito.
Okinawa, Japan. Kaori and her girlfriends are ready to have a fun time at a summer house after recently graduating but the second they arrive they smell something awful, a rotting body perhaps. Wrong! Instead it’s a fish with robotic spider looking legs. Yes, a walking fish. After killing the creature, the girls try to relax only for a great white shark to charge through their window and attack them. This is just the start of a full blown walking fish invasion that’s spreading across the entire island, causing chaos and infecting humans along the way, turning them into fat, rotting, living corpses that eventually have tubes shoved in their mouths, up their asses and eventually get their own set of spider legs. The movie follows Kaori as she makes her way to Tokyo in search of her fiancé Tadashi. Along the way she meets a cameraman named Shirakawa whose goal is to help her reach Tadashi in hopes of finding out how these fish gained the ability to walk.
The only good part about this film is that rather than establish an actual narrative, once we hit the two minute mark and we finish laughing at the ridiculous pre-credit opening sequence it immediately dives into the action. Minus some laughable scenes scattered throughout, that is the only positive thing I can really say about the film.
Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the animated style from the get-go. It seemed like that low grade hand drawn style from the early 90s infused with some crappy 3D/CGI animation (this was only for the fish) to give us a terribly blended looking picture that seemed like it didn’t know what type of anime it wanted to be.
There were multiple times throughout the movie where I kept asking myself “what the f*ck is going on right now?” Like every reason for any disgusting human mutation, during WWII the Japanese conducted experiments on an island and years later, during transportation, the experiment fell into the ocean resulting in the chaos we saw on screen. All of which deserves a bold “WTF mate?”
If you want the ultimate proof that there were issues with the film, here it is: You know your movie is bad when at least ten people walk out of a film that’s only 70 minutes. To top that off, the movie actually felt too long particularly because the ending was SO drawn out.
I didn’t have high expectations for this movie but I did have two reasonable ones. Firstly, if someone was surrounded by flesh eating, human destroying creatures, they would have to be attacked no matte
r who the character was. Secondly, if there are millions of fish crawling around the city and you know you are making a disturbing film, I expect to see a lot of chomping and killing. I was disappointed on both fronts. There is a scene at the end where our lead reaches out into a heard of monsters and somehow walks away unscathed but her friend, who is farther away, manages to get infected. As for the killing, we did not see enough people getting attacked by the fish. That sounds perverse, I know, but it’s what you would expect when you see the trailer.
Overall, Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack did not come close to being the film I had thought it would be. It had a crazy and disturbing concept with some nasty visuals but me, along with the group of people I was with, found it be laughably bad and not nearly as ridiculously fun as it could have been. This, simply put, was a crappy anime and one I wouldn’t recommend to anyone except a very select group of people.
Rating: The awesomeness of walking killer sharks couldn’t save this film from being anything but a train wreck (2/10)
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