Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1992)

This nightmarish, underground Japanese black-and-white movie deserves some kind of kudos for sheer originality and kinetic pacing, but it's not an easy movie to sit through by any means. Dispensing with the usual structures of a film - narrative drive, characterisation, story - Tsukamoto instead paints a vivid and uncompromising view of a world in which metal is taking over.Along the way, the film packs in the following: stop-motion animation; maggots; graphic gore; male and female rape; and repeated scenes of stop-motion action and photography. So it's not an easy movie to watch by any means and you have to give it a real go to sit through it all. While a few of the make-up influences are clear - VIDEODROME and THE TERMINATOR to name but two - this is unlike any other movie I've watched and difficult to review. I won't say that I enjoyed it, because that would be lying and I hated many scenes, but there are some scenes of visual imagination which are quite impressive, especially with the sufficiently "epic" style ending; the metal bodysuit is inspired, the thumping music effective and I loved the nightmarish journeys which whizzed through the streets of Japan on a drug-fuelled ride.Otherwise, the acting is lousy and over-the-top and things happen so quickly that it's confusing in the extreme, especially when characters keep popping up and you have to concentrate to figure out who is who. I could also have done without some of the explicit unpleasantness that this film offers up as well. TETSUO is a must for connoisseurs of the bizarre, but the sheer speed of this film renders it almost unwatchable.

This Japanese film was formerly in one of the editions of the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before Die, it is a film known to use the science-fiction subgenre "cyberpunk", focusing on "high tech low life", the weird poster for the film certainly got my attention. Basically a strange, known only as the "Metal Fetishist" (Shin'ya Tsukamoto), seems to have an insane obsession to stick pieces of scrap metal to his body. The man is out walking and gets hit, possibly killed, by a Japanese businessman, or "salaryman" (Tomorowo Taguchi), out driving with his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara). Following this accident the businessman notices a piece of metal protruding from under his skin, it seems he is being slowly taken over by some kind of disease, his body is being turned into scrap metal. It becomes obvious that the man he hit with the car is not actually dead, he is his nemesis and is somehow masterminding and guiding his rage and frustration-fuelled transformation. Also starring Nobu Kanaoka as Woman in Glasses, Naomasa Musaka as Doctor and Renji Ishibashi as Tramp. This film reminds me of Eraserhead, a black and white nightmare brought to life, this is indeed another film like that, there are so much surreal and disturbing imagery, with metal parts destroying the body of a man, a penis turning into a rotating metal drill and trying to rape a woman with it, and lots of blood spill, it is a strange art house style cult movie that will appeal to those who like scary movies, and have strong stomachs, an interesting horror. Worth watching!

Once again, after watching a movie where the audience's general response seems to be either love/hate, I found myself stuck in the middle of the road.I really wanted to like this movie, and for a while I did. The bizarre and captivating imagery, sound effects, music, cinematography and the use of black and white all work together to create a nightmarish experience. There are some truly freaky scenes in here. Problem is, the movie drags in places, especially towards the end, where it seems to go on forever and gradually loses it's creepy, nightmarish feel, and the endless barrages of scrap metal thrown in my face starts to get tiresome. Simply put, when the movie is good, it's nightmarish, but when it's bad, it's boring as metal-man s**t.While Tetsuo has several scenes that are really effective, and the effects look pretty awesome, as the movie went on, I just found myself increasingly getting more and more bored with it. I don't know, maybe it'll grow on me if I give it a second chance, which I will probably do, because I have not seen anything like it before.

Shinya Tsukamoto's cult classic Tetsuo the iron man (1988) simply is beyond words! Cinema takes an obnoxious, bizarre and graphic form and results in the creation of one of the most scariest and shocking film experiences. It's hard to believe that this film had a very low budget and was shot with a 16 mm. All the elements such as the jaw-dropping stop motion effect, the incredible metallic soundtrack, the smart sound mixing, the extreme film editing, the black and white cinematography and an highly innovative story come together beautifully and prove that cinema, indeed, is limitless and low budget can never suppress a man's vision. At times, the film takes a (deliciously) surreal form but we never lose our grasp on understanding Tetsuo's story-line. This film is not, even for a millisecond, afraid of throwing the most bizarre and gut-wrenching images at it's audiences (Which are hardly pretentious, for the record). There is, supposedly, a metaphor hidden in Tetsuo that man has developed a 'fetish' for machines and has been consumed by it. The film graphically shows people transforming into hybrids of metal and flesh which was quite brilliantly filmed. The idea of recycling metallic scrap as props was a smart move!This film is, obviously, not for everyone. And whether you hate it or love it, Tetsuo still manages to rape your senses (I loved it!), giving you an experience that is totally new. I warn you again that this film is extremely bizarre and experimental so enter at your own will. A nightmarish near-masterpiece that easily beats David Lynch's Eraserhead, a film which had originally inspired Tetsuo.4.7/5