GYO Tokyo Fish Attack

Overview:

Kaori and her friends are taking a graduation trip when walking fish suddenly attack?

Review:

I’m going to put this one in context. I had never heard of this movie but I received the disc when I bought one of Hanabee’s mystery boxes and decided to give it a go after a very long week when I was very tired. It probably didn’t help that I watched it with someone equally tired who also hasn’t watched all that much anime. I’m not even going to try to avoid spoilers because there just isn’t enough plot to be able to spoil in this case.

You know how after you’ve watched a lot of anime you kind of feel like nothing will ever make you wonder again? GYO proved beyond all doubt that this is a false sentiment. No matter how many completely random, weird, or bizarre set ups I’ve seen, nothing really prepares you for walking, sort-of-zombie, marine life and then gaseous diseased humans being strapped onto walking apparatuses and having various tubes inserted places they should be all the while releasing yet more of the gas into the already pretty heavy atmosphere.

The movie is short (running just a bit over an hour) and that is more than enough. No, you still don’t know what caused the whole walking fish thing (other than one crack pot scientist’s theory that it was linked to some biological warfare testing during the world wars – but this is never confirmed beyond his own ramblings). Only one of the characters you know the name of makes it through the whole thing seemingly uninfected and she (while making various statements about truth being only what you see, doesn’t seem to care what caused anything having spent most of the running time trying to reunite with her fiance.

This is an absolute mess of a movie with possible sci-fi links, a b grade horror kind of feel in places (check the friend who likes having sex and is one of the first to turn into a bloated human while still wearing her very skimpy underwear), a terrible romance, and a bad action all kind of mixed together. The bottom line is it doesn’t handle any of the elements well and it quickly becomes predictable from a narrative point of view even while individual scenes catch you off guard (the shark in the bus was pretty weird no matter how you look at it).

That said, by the midway point I wondered when we would see an octopus groping a girl and sure enough the scene came up a few minutes later. Totally unnecessary and it was literally the only time in the entire movie we saw an octopus but clearly cohesion isn’t what some of these scenes were going for given one of the mob-scenes toward the end included a cow that was infected.

After all of this I’m left with a few questions.

Firstly, why are Kaori, Aki and Erika (I may have one of those names wrong) friends? Aki seems to hate both Kaori and Erika, Erika is clearly not interested in female friends and Kaori is totally fiance obsessed. They have nothing to talk about and that is clear in every interaction they have. It’s actually a relief when Kaori bails on them to return to Tokyo.

Secondly, how did Kaori not get infected? She was cut in one scene, pierced in another and she should have been pierced in a couple of other scenes. That said, she also should have had multiple broken bones and a concussion after getting thrown around in a few of the scenes and she probably should have outright died in the plane or the train crash so she’s apparently the luckiest person on the planet.

Finally, what is supposed to happen now? Essentially the zombie-fish things won only they all blew up and now there are people and cats and dogs and cows on the walking apparatuses that seem to just keep appearing.

If you don’t mind adult content (nudity, sex, and human mutation) you might get a laugh out of this movie. Or you might just spend the whole thing trying to pick your jaw off the floor. As I said, there are moments that are genuinely entertaining but the story as a whole never comes together and the characters are kind of painful.