Tetsuo: The Iron Man | 鉄男 (1989)
US Title: Tetsuo: The Iron Man
First off, I think I need to explain myself here. Tetsuo was my very first exposure to the world of Japanese cinema, back in the early 1990’s. What’s that say about me, then?! lol.
I say that because Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a brilliant, weird, sick, and twisted bit of film. Part splatter-genre gore fest, part heavy metal music video gone awry, part video game from the future, part black and white film noir, and every bit of an assault on your senses.
To be honest, I still don’t think I understand it. The plot (if indeed there is one) involves an un-named guy (Tomorowo Taguchi) running over a newly-implanted “metal fetishist” (director Shinya Tsukamoto) in his car and somehow being “cursed” by him to transform into a metal hybrid. I think. Like I said the whole thing is a bit weird and difficult to follow.
“Tetsuo” as we’ll call him meets up with his girlfriend, and this is where things definitely take a turn for the twisted, as the, um, uh, metal bits ultimately get the best of her. Let’s just leave it at that.
Let me just go ahead and spoil it for you, in the end Tetsuo and “the fetishist” duke it out in a stainless battle royale, only to become fused together into a rolling metal tank in some sort of homo-erotic statement as they set out to “metalize” the world…
Yeah. OK.
Like I said, I’m not sure I get it yet. The real allure of this picture is the style, pure and simple. I can guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite like it, and I can’t recall ever seeing anything like it since. The strange music-video like edits, the grainy black and white, the stop-motion animation, the hardcore late-1980’s industrial-slash-nintendo game soundtrack…
…its just totally F’ed up in just about every respect.
Not for the faint of heart, I still like it, just for the reasons above, but I just wish it made more sense!!
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096251/
Amazon: Tetsuo: The Iron Man
See if you can see what I’m talking about from the trailer…. and I’d go ahead and say, quite loudly, NSFW or the kids!!! You’ve been warned!!!
and here’s a bonus scene, also decidely NSFW
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