TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989)
Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Starring: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Shinya Tsukamoto
Genre: Horror
Running Time: 65mins

Rating:

A nameless businessman (Tomoroh Taguchi) and his wife dump the body of a hit and run victim in forestry. The victim had just performed a brutal act of self mutilation by inserting a steel bar into his thigh. The following morning, as the businessman shaves he spots a small metallic rupture on his face, later that day he is pursued by a woman possessed by the metallic embodiment of the hit and run victims vengeful spirit. What follows is a dizzying spectacle of mutation and destruction not just of the businessman and his deranged sexual lifestyle but also that of the industrial city that surrounds him.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man was a part of my early dabbling with Japanese cinema. Having consumed a fair amount of anime, some Kurosawa and badly dubbed Godzilla movies I caught a late night showing of Tetsuo on channel 4. My attention caught by the namesake of another metamorphic character (Tetsuo from the Katsuhiro Otomo manga/film "Akira") I sat with baited breath wondering what would take place before my eyes.

What indeed.

Starting with a painstakingly long, graphic scene of a leg being sliced open Tetsuo hit me for six immediately and didn't let me calm down until the credits had rolled. A collage of perversity, eroticism, violence, destruction and mayhem it was, and still is, a startling debut film from one of Japans finest auteurs, Shinya Tsukamoto.

Straight from the cold black beating heart of the cyber-punk era this is as industrial as it gets - it breathes, screams and bleeds machinery from the pounding score from Chu Ishikawa to the infestation of steel of its protagonist it's a tense, claustrophobic head fuck that comes at you like a bullet. Using budgetary limitations to an advantage Tsukamoto's camera never lets up taking us on high speed chases through crumbling wreckage using stop motion techniques to drive us headlong into a nightmarish world.

And so as the visual overload continues to pummel the viewer into submission at the site of a steel tube grinding into the ass of a salaryman, said Salaryman's penis transforming into a drill, and worse still said penis actually claiming a victim in one of the films more gruesome scenes. Its hard at first viewing to actually contemplate there being anything more to Tetsuo than just sheer schlock horror thrills. Surely this is nothing more than a controversial, bile inducing film revelling in its excesses like a pig in shit. There can't be a message.

But there is.

Granted there are many layers to delve beneath before you reach "the point" of Tetsuo, far more than the somewhat lacklustre sequel which while just as abrasive in its depiction of violence chose to thrust out its social message for all to see. What we're witnessing here is something similar to that of the oxygen destroyer in the Gojira movies, acting as a metaphor for man's ability to both create and destroy in equal measure. Man it seems is not content to destroy just himself but all around him.

Post-war Japanese cinema has undoubtedly been influenced by the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and so with nuclear testing came Godzilla's oxygen destroyer, in Tetsuo 2 the drugs/weapon metaphor of infestation through injection and the uncontrollable, unstoppable destructive power of the literally inbuilt weaponry just a continuation of this theme.

The appetite for destruction is a fear born into this generation of filmmakers having grown up in the midst of the anti-atomic testing era of Japan a place where characters like Atom Boy exist. Man it seems is the destructive power behind Tetsuo, an expression of fear for an apocalypse while also finding perverse pleasure in the iconic imagery of an average salaryman being deconstructed from his average life into the creation of a formidable machine. It's textbook atom era paranoia personified through the eyes of Cronenberg.

A beautifully repulsive film, Tetsuo contains some fine mugging from Tomorowo Taguchi, the sultry Kei Fujiwara and of course its creator Shinya Tsukamoto actor, writer, cinematographer, editor, director extraordinaire.

An explosive experience.