Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Tetsuo: The Iron Man Movie Review

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Buy Tetsuo: The Iron Man on Amazon
Written by: Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Directed by: Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Starring: Kei Fujiwara, Tomorowo Taguchi, Nobu Kanaoka
Rated: --

My rating is simple, Watch It, It Depends, Skip it. Read my previous movie reviews!

Plot
A businessman is slowly transformed into a hybrid of metal and flesh after accidentally killing The Metal Fetishist.

Verdict
This movie is a trip. I watched it and still can't describe what I saw, but it is definitely unsettling. Falling in the body horror genre, this visually assaults your eyes. What's impressive is the fact that someone not only came up with the concept but got it on screen. Watching this is the equivalent of being in a conversation with someone speaking an unknown language. Most people will not like this but it will be unlike anything you've ever seen.
It depends.

Review
This seems so much older than '89 with the film grain and black and white, even the clothing looks like it's from an older time period..
One of the first scenes is the unnamed Metal Fetishist putting a threaded steel rod in his leg. If that's not bad enough, when he runs it through his teeth in quick cut, the resulting sound is like nails on a chalkboard.

Without Wikipedia to help on the synopsis, I'd be even more lost and despite that I only have the vaguest sense of what's occurring. I can honestly say I don't know what I watched. Some of the edits are so quick I can't identify what I'm seeing. While it's incoherent, it is consistent. I marvel that someone came up with this.

A guy hits and kills the Metal Fetishist with his car. Somehow, and I can't explain how, the Metal Fetishist exact revenge by causing the guy to turn into a walking pile of scrap metal.

When you don't understand a movie, you say it's ahead of it's time. This movie is light years into the future. The movie makes an overt link to the transformation and sexuality. The 'drill' appendage... This is a movie best described in adjectives, overwhelming, bewildering, and confusing.
It reaches a point where it's just rapid images flashing on the screen.


This isn't bad in the common sense. The markers of a typically bad movie aren't present. This is a wild idea taken to an extreme. Tsukamoto has a purpose with this movie, I'll just never know what exactly that is.

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