Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992)

A brilliant re-imagining of Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 cult classic now with more story, more special effect and a bigger budget. Body Hammer is my favorite movie in the tetsuo series because it's expanded more with the story while keeping the storyline same and doing something new.The effects are unique and uniquely unreal, as they were in the original. This is one filmmaker's nightmares rendered real. These two films, along with Lynch's Eraserhead, are the real deal. The cutting is fast so as to cause many (already extreme) shots to register on the subconscious more than the seeing eye. It will haunt you.This is truly a worthy sequel that is a worth to watch.I will rate this movie: highly watch this movie out of 10.

The first movie, "Tetsuo", was mostly a visual experience, while this sequel is also attempting to throw in some more story this time. It makes this movie a bit less artistic and a bit more mainstream than its predecessor but only just a bit though."Tetsuo II: Body Hammer" is for most part being still one psychedelic ride. There are lots of odd images and events, that just don't make sense in the real world but help to make this still a good and intriguing watch. The movie has a more of a manga vibe and feeling to it than anything else really. Fans of manga will therefore also most likely to appreciate this movie better than the average person.It's obvious that Shinya Tsukamoto has progressed more as a director when watching this movie and compare it to its predecessor. It's also obvious that they had far more money to spend this time, though its still being a low-budget production.This movie doesn't makes much sense as a sequel but then again, the movie just doesn't make much sense in general. It's for most part simply a movie you have to experience, though I admit that it all got a bit tiresome to watch after a while. It also seemed as if the film-makers stopped caring toward the end and dropped the story and all logic. This is when the movie becomes a quite distant and bland one, that only solely relies on its images to keep its viewers interested. This might had all worked for an hour long movie but this movie is about 30 minutes too long for that. This is the foremost reason why the first movie is still the better one, despite the fact that this movie makes more 'sense' and is also a better made one, with better production values and all.Pehaps only truly interesting to watch this movie as a live-action manga.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

This heavy scifi/action sequel was just insane! After a family man receives some sort of injection from a mysterious pair of fellows, he finds himself with the strange reflex/ability to grow chunks of metal out of his body, sometimes going as far as to make small canons! I think the added coherency to the plot made this sequel more enjoyable than the original, while still maintaining a healthy level of chaos. It's filled with all kinds of bizarre happenings and filmed with a unique variety of styles (stop-motion, dissolving montages, hyper editing, etc…). I also found the music to be quite effective in this one, almost like it was pumping up the viewer as much as the metal was pumping up Yatsu! The movie just had a driving, hectic feel that worked for me.

What a movie. You don't stumble onto a film like Tetsuo II: Body Hammer every day, and that's probably a good thing. The jerkier-than-Blair Witch cinematography, the wild & crazy stop motion special effects, and the bucketloads of gore are fairly sufficient to ensure that some viewers won't like this movie. Since you're actually reading this, though, you're probably a pretty jaded and open-minded film fan, which is exactly the audience that would end up liking Body Hammer. It's one of the craziest and most extreme movies I've ever seen, particularly in the brutal, nearly unwatchable flashback sequence which occurs in the last twenty minutes. It's one of those scenes that you never, ever, ever forget. But aside from the brutal and bizarre violence, there is great artistry here; the scenes between Taniguchi and his family strike a real chord of tragedy, and the special effects somehow succeed precisely because they DON'T look real at all. And Tsukamoto's vision of Tokyo is terrifying-- he makes the city look like a nearly uninhabited frozen hell of silent glass towers and crumbling steel factories. If any of this sounds appealing, you might just like this movie as much as I do. Tsukamoto's style can be incredibly jarring, but you'll end up running out to find everything else he's directed (to my knowledge, his only other films available in the US are the original Tetsuo and his horrific boxing film Tokyo Fist). Shinya Tsukamoto is one of the most inventive directors alive-- you never know what abomination he's going to create next. And Tetsuo: Body Hammer might just be his best film.