Ever since the trailer first appeared online, fans of gratuitous ultraviolence have been waiting for The Machine Girl (Cine Asia, £14.99) with as much excitement as Ted Bundy clutching a co-ed’s roomkey. “A schoolgirl with a machine gun for an arm blasting yakuza arse? Awesome!” And it truly is. When Ami’s little brother and his best friend are killed by bullies she goes out wreaking fearsome vengeance, in the process getting her arm hacked off by a yakuza family whose son turns out to have been the chief bully (incidentally, while the whole family like to get together for a bit of maiming and murder, it’s mother who is the real artiste, beating maids to death and making the family chef eat his own fingers as sushi). Ami escapes, bleeding heavily, and manages to crawl to a local garage which happens to be run by the parents of her dead brother’s dead friend; they make her a machine gun prosthetic and Ami is ready for the final showdown. Along its carcass-strewn way, the film takes in decapitation, necrophilia, a flying guillotine and lots and lots of splurting, splattering, spraying bright red blood, before winding up in an orgiastic frenzy of screen slaughter.

Meatball Machine’s (4Digital Asia, £14.99) premise has none of the sexy Tarantino-feted coolness of Machine Girl, but scores high on ridiculousness. Alien parasites are playing a viciously violent game which involves invading humans and using their bodies as biomechanical weapons, controlled from a kind of command-pod-pus-filled boil on the victim’s shoulder, customised with various tentacles and sprouting guns and cannons. Caught up in this bloody ailen playground two shy young romantics fall in love before they, too, become infested parasite toys.
The film appears to have been shot on an utterly random assortment of cameras, as if the crew broke into a studio at night and filmed using whatever was lying around, resulting in violent lurches between colour schemes and levels of graininess. Meatball Machine, for all its body horror, is played for laughs, and ends with a fantastically silly scene of two parasites discussing upgrading humans for enhanced gaming excitement.

Directed by Nishimura himself, Tokyo Gore Police (4Digital Asia, £14.99) is leagues more ambitious, and extreme even for extreme Asian cinema. Gore-content – spraying blood, dismembered body stuffed in box, chomped-off penis, acid-spraying breasts – is both high and accomplished, but shock-material extends beyond the splatterfest arsenal, taking in self-harm, bug-eating, fetish costumes and S&M. Thankfully, the above constitute more than just purposeless stabs at controversy: Tokyo Gore Police is a work of social satire, with a considerable degree of self-reflexivity. It is set at some point in the not-so-distant future; the police have been privatised, with unsurprisingly terrible results. Ads and interactive bubbly newsreader-type interludes ridicule a society in thrall to violence – there are ads for swords specially designed for committting hara-kiri, “cute” candy-coloured little knives for wrist-slicing. And, in its sexual content, like the woman’s legs which mutate into alligator jaws, the film makes some (admitedly unsubtle) comments on the fetishisation of violence. The lurid, twisted imagination driving this fantasy-horror, mixed with the hallucinat­ory camerawork and episodic narrative, casts a sickly trip-like sheen over Tokyo Gore Police, as if it had spilled out of the brain of Guillermo del Toro had he had a severely dysfunctional childhood and then taken some really bad acid.