Tokyo Gore Police was released to several film festivals in North America. It received generally positive reviews, noting that Tokyo Gore Police lives up to the film's title, by being gory, perverse and bizarre.

The film is set in a near future chaotic Japan. A mad scientist known as "Key Man" has created a virus that mutates humans into monstrous creatures called "Engineers" that sprout bizarre weapons from any injury. The Tokyo Police Force has been privatized to deal with this new threat of engineers, so a special squad of officers called "Engineer Hunters" are created to deal with them. However, unlike the average police force, the Engineer Hunters are a private quasi-military force that utilize violence, sadism, and streetside executions to maintain law and order.

Helping the police force is Ruka, an anti-social, self-harming loner, who is very skilled in dispatching the engineers. Along with helping the police, she is looking for the killer of her father, an old-fashioned officer who was murdered in broad daylight by a mysterious assassin. Ruka soon receives a new case to hunt down Key Man. When she meets Key Man, Ruka finds that they both are seeking vengeance against the corrupt officers who killed both of their fathers many years ago. However, in a highly ironic fashion, it was Key Man's father who actually murdered Ruka's father. Soon afterwards, Ruka's life takes on bizarre, tragic twists and turns.

While working on special effects for Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl, Yoshihiro Nishimura was asked by Media Blasters if he wanted to do another film. Nishimura decided to make Tokyo Gore Police, a remake of an independent film that he made many years before called Anatomia Extinction which received the Special Jury Award in the Off Theatre competition at the 1995 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival. Shot and completed in just two weeks, Tokyo Gore Police would be Nishumura's first commercial film.

The fight choreographer for the film was Taku Sakaguchi who Nishimura has worked with previously on the film Meatball Machine. The comical yet satirical television commercial scenes in the film were filmed by Noboru Iguchi and Yūdai Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi suggested this to bring a different flavor to the film to balance out the rest of the film's more dark tone.

Tokyo Gore Police premiered in several film festivals before being released in Japan. The film had its North American premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival on June 21, 2008. The film premiered in Canada at the Fantasia Festival on July 12, 2008. The film has its Asian premiere at the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival in July 2008.

A Region 1 DVD of the film was released on January 13, 2009. A Region 2 DVD of the film was released on April 13, 2009 by 4Digital Media. A straight to video prequel has been announced for release in Japan.

Tokyo Gore Police was received well by American critics on its original release. The film ranking website Rotten Tomatoes reported an average rating of 7.2 out of 10, based upon a sample of nine reviews. Brian Chen reviewed Police with a score of 3.5/5. He comments, "It's not a horrible film; it's not a great film; it's just everything it tries to be -- perverse, grotesque, bizarre -- and a little more.". V.A. Musetto of the New York Post gave the film three stars out of four calling the film "bloody good". Michael Esposito of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars noting the film as "sick, twisted and gory, but surprisingly funny in an adolescent boy fantasy way—Beavis and Butt-Head would love it."

Russel Edwards of Variety claimed "Like Tokyo Shock's recent "Machine Girl," for which helmer provided gore effects, pic will fleetingly exist in midnight sidebars at fests and much longer on fanboy ancillary." as well as that Tokyo Gore Police had "occasionally witty moments, but the relentless catalog of mutilations lacks the emotional power of similar fare in pics by, say, fellow Japanese gorehound Shinya Tsukomoto[sic]".