Tetsuo (DVD)

When I got my screener for Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a well-regarded Japanese film from 1988, I was sure it would be sci-fi though the publicist handling this new DVD release assured me it was horror. Sometimes publicists say things like that, hoping to find every available review angle for their product – but in this case, it was true. Although the story is about a man who becomes a machine, it’s very much in the horror vein.

And speaking of veins, we see several of them right off the bat when our protagonist knifes his leg open, rips out the bone and replaces it with a huge metal rod.

Short on plot and long on visuals, Tetsuo: The Iron Man isn’t an easy movie to write a review about. Its merging of warm flesh and cold metal are brings to mind a fictional David Cronenberg remake of Metropolis, infused with an unhealthy dose of a homoerotic, manga-loving, abstract cyberpunk. On drugs.

Filmed in kinetic, epileptic black and white, Tetsuo: The Iron Man follows a businessman (Tomoroh Taguchi) whose world is turned more than upside down when he finds that his body is fusing with the metal objects around him – is it a dream? A nightmare? Reality? No matter what it is, the man experiences terrible pain and horrifying fear as his twisted body comes into surreal contact with other iron-people: namely wild women with ill-intended techno-fetishes. (The oh-so-phallic drill scene in Brian De Palma’s Body Double is a mere pinprick compared to Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man!)

While the one-hour movie does play like an extended 80s music video (in addition to the visual assault, the music is delightfully techno-harsh), at least it’s intelligent, interesting, gruesome, humorous and compelling. Don’t get me wrong: you do have to be in the mood for this sort of thing, but if you are then by all means slip this explicit disc into your DVD player and hang on for the gear-grinding ride.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson