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Tetsuo - The Iron Man (Special Edition) Actors: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara Director: Shinya Tsukamoto Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Closed-captioned Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 67 minutes Studio: Tartan Video Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2005-07-19 Buy from Amazon |
 "Good Movie, I Just wanna know WHAT'S GOING ON?"First off, this is the strangest piece of celluoid I've seen in all my years of movie viewing. I don't know what kind of audience the director is aiming at or what he's trying to prove, but man, whatever he wanted to do he must have done it well because this is also one of the most entertaining things on celluoid I've seen as well. Clocking in at about 70 minutes, this movie doesn't waste it's time with nuisances like color, diagloge, or even a plot. Here's what I picked up at least I think this is what's happening. There's this crazy nut and he puts a screw through his leg or something and decides to talk a walk. (Best time to take a walk is right after you stab yourself in the leg) So he walks around and gets run over by another guy. The guy who killed him doesn't do much, apparently this is acceptable in Japan. But he probably wishes that he didn't do that now, because he now has...a metal whisker. I kid you not, his ironic payback is A METAL WHISKER! WHY? But on a more important note, what do you do when you have a metal whisker? Pull on it, of course. That wasn't a good thing cause now he's squirting blood all over the place. When will those nutty japs ever learn? This doesn't effect him too much, he doesn't even care when some lady on a subway turns into a metallic zombie for no apparent reason and trys to get with him. No, the tale isn't over yet, next thing he knows his wang is replaced by a giant rotating screw. Naturally, this pleases his wife and she wants to test it out immediately. Big mistake, cause know she's squirting blood all over the place. Them japs, them crazy, crazy japs. But blood isn't enough, she also needs to turn into cottage cheese and form into that crazy metal zombie. OOOOKAY! Bad clay animation follows and the two love birds form a metal beast that wants to destroy the world. That's basically it, speechless huh? Well, if you were shocked by this review then you shouldn't see the film. Otherwise grab some Ovaltine and start yer watchin'.  "Grind"A simple tale of a man who turns into a giant metal monster, accompanied by suitably extreme noise-core techno / metal, 'Tetsuo' just is. There is a plot, of sorts - the film would make less sense if it ran backwards - but it's not really very important. Instead, the high-contrast, starkly grey-and-black imagery passes at different speeds, with occasional pauses for single words of dialogue (mainly 'OOF!' and 'USSS!'). There's a really nasty sex scene too, one that will make you wince and laugh out loud at the same time. Despite being inexplicable, furious, and one of a kind, there was a sequel - in colour, and with a polished look, it had a plot that trod a fine line between being evocatively minimalist, and standard Anime cliche (our hero has an evil brother, you can guess the rest). "Techno-Erotica"This is a blend of live-action and stop-motion animation and is in no way related to the famous Marvel Comics' superhero of the same name. Described as techno-erotic, this is one hyperkinetic ride. Take the pace of the film "Run, Lola, Run" and combine it with the surreal weirdness of "Eraserhead." Oh, yeah, how can I forget the explicit sex and violence?! Leave it to the Japanese to create another insane-in-the-brain, balls-out freak film. For such a repressed society, they come up with the most crazy sexually angry flicks. Tetsuo is the tale of a timid business man that begins to change into a man made of metal, not in a suit of armor kind of way, but in a nuts, bolts, and jagged sheet metal kind of way. The special effects are top-notch and include a scene where our hero gains a power drill penis and makes love (?) with a local cutie. Thank God this is a black and white film or the blood spattering would seem really over the top. "for a blown mind"pure visual & mental excitement. though tetsuoII has a stronger storyline,i prefer this one better.the "drill" was just awesome. this black&white flim is outta this world,it takes u to a journey to explore about the wildest ,the sickest state of mind.the latest work "gemini" of Tsukamoto is also not to be missed. tetsuo"iron man" is the second best japanese flim i've even seen. (the best to me is "summer vacation")  "CHAOS IN BIONIC"Do androids dream of electric sheep? Maybe. This, then, could be their nightmare. Or what passes for a bad peyote trip for them. Ferric and feral, Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 debut, where an unassuming Salaryman (Tomoro taguchi) mutates into a bio-mechanical living weapon, is a fractured-reality must-see. Set in a neither-here-nor-there Japan only a fever-wracked noggin could hallucinate, this isn't Japan as hypermodern sci-fic megacity. Rather, it's blighted underside. Its scummy industrial backdrop is all derelict factories, corroded steel, tarnished chrome and frayed cordite. Lynchian deja vu might set in but "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" exists in its own techno-erotic purgatory, and one that gets farther under the skin than "Eraserhead" ever did. Tsukamoto's closer kindred spirit seems to be David Cronenberg. Tsukamoto seems taken with the same apocalyptic neuroses as Cronenberg : men terrorized by their own malfunctioning bodies, the evolutionary possibilities of changeling flesh. But Tsukamoto's far less arctic and cerebral. Basic instinct confronts the abstract by assigning order to the chaos. And the retina-scorching transmutations can get so out-there, you might want to believe they're metaphors: for the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic,a familiar tsukamoto kink. Or maybe it's all a blackly comic send-up of the mechanisation of the social psyche. But such rationalizations neither deepen the mystery nor heighten the rush. Tsukamoto doesn't really want us to decipher the enigmas. It's the text, not the subtext, that matters. He's pushing a different kick: the pure, twisted and unsettling sensation of watching the Everyday splinter into the irrational, pulling us into a state of anxiety whose very lack of balance is its chief psychoactive. It's the adrenaline of entropy, the poetry of confusion. It's blood and energy, full-on. And Tsukamoto's arsenal certainly has explosive. It's like fragmentation grenades to the brain pan. It's vast. It's hyper. It's ultraviolet and futuristic. But. Tsukamoto , soon enough, ODs on his own momentum. Watching "Tetsuo:The Iron man" in one go can get as exhausting as memorizing Calculus equations while doing High-Impact Aerobics on a ton of caffeine. Everything verges on sensory overload in the final 4th. Shortcircuit. Then you crash. But before that happens, you'd have gotten your chromosomes mad-scrambled by what is still , ten years or so down the line, one of the most unforgettable chunks of weird science, death-metal nihilism and low-tech rage against the machine. |
