REVIEW: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a repulsive, offensive descent into a stagnant pool of graphically-depicted technophobia and erotica, and I mean that in the best possible way.  It's a psycho-sexual nightmare, a lurid depiction of an anti-hero doomed to transmogrify into a walking metal scrapyard.  Why is he doomed?  Because he ran over a man with his car and, instead of contacting the authorities, opted instead to bang his girlfriend while staring at the victim (an obvious decision, really).  Why a metal scrapyard?  Oh, because the victim is a metal fetishist who cuts his skin open and shoves screws and pipes inside.  Which is a commentary on sadomasochistic culture, an increasingly mechanistic society, and things people should never ever do.

Shot on grimy low-grade film, evoking out-of-the-way cult favorites like Eraserhead, Akira, and the works of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, Tetsuo is a creative mixture of film styles.  Director Shinya Tsukamoto, who would go on to direct two more Tetsuo films, deserves credit not only for his eclectic influences, but for how completely he commits to the insanity of his premises.  He crafts an atmosphere thick in discomfort, thanks to both content and presentation.  It's not enough for him that somebody sexually assaults a woman with a mutated penis-drill.  It's that the scene's editing feels arrhythmic, that the camera jitters, that the score scrapes and shrieks.  Tsukamoto takes the shocking content and making it artful.

Tsukamoto also takes some inspiration from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead pictures, especially in long shots that hold a character steady in the foreground while zipping an enormous environment past them.  Hell, there's even a scene where the hero fights his surprisingly uncooperative hand.

Tsukamoto occasionally comes within shouting distance of those pulp masterpieces, although Raimi had the good sense to pause and lower the volume from time to time.  Tetsuo rarely allows any time for rest.  With its brief sixty-seven minute runtime, the film packs in every damn image it can find, racing from one to the other with the sense and clarity of a hamster on cocaine.  So many times, I wanted the movie to stop and take a breath.  But no sooner does the hero narrowly escape a metal-woman in the subway than he has a waking dream in which his girlfriend suddenly becomes another metal-monster.  Unbridled enthusiasm is great in theory, but the risk with such a frantic pace is that a film becomes exhausting instead of energetic.

Tetsuo doesn't accelerate to its conclusion so much as stay in the red from beginning to end, but the climax goes even further.  Maybe too far.  The anti-hero and the metal fetishist, no surprise, face off against each other, and the face-offery becomes so abstractly depicted that it ceases to function as story and becomes a fever dream of isolated images, not beholden to sense or form.  Opponents clash.  They race.  One screams.  Another poses.  They race.  One clutches his hand.  Something flies.  Close-up of another thing.  What was that thing?  No time.  They race again.  In truth, the anti-hero and the metal fetishist are working together, and their common enemy is the casual viewer's bourgeois expectation of logic.

There are a select few people who will not just enjoy a movie like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, but thrive in its unapologetic exploitation and free-associative weirdness.  As a piece of extreme cinema, it deserves comparison to baroque gangster nightmare Ichi the Killer and the indescribable Uzumaki, which was the movie where spiral magic turned people into gigantic snails.  Why snails?  Damned if I know.  It's hard to say that I had a "good" time with Tetsuo, or that I think the movie's "good," or that "good" is a word that holds any relevance in appraising the film.  I will say that the film functions better as unstoppable weirdness than meaningful commentary, but, if nothing else, Tetsuo is what it is, heroically so.  It demands to be seen.  By who?  If you've read this far and are still curious, it just might be you.  That's no small privilege.

RATING: B