MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO THE BULLET MAN (2009)

Starring
Eric Bossick as Anthony
Akiko Mono as Yuriko
Yuko Nakamura as Mitsue
Stephen Sarrazin as Ride
Shinya Tsukamoto as The Guy


Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Written by Shinya Tsukamoto and Hisakatsu Kuroki
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Cinematography by Satoshi Hayashi, Takayuki Shida, and Shinya Tsukamoto
Edited by Yuji Ambe and Shinya Tsukamoto
Production Design by Shinya Tsukamoto
Costume Design by Mari Sakurai
Produced by Shinichi Kawahara, Masayuki Tanishima, and Shinya Tsukamoto


A Kaijyu Theatre Production


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"You don't want me inside you. You don't know what I'll do."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Anthony (Eric Bossick) has nightmares about a boy with a vibrating face of molten slag. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Mono) has the same nightmares. She's willing to talk about it, but Anthony keeps it inside. Anthony keeps a lot inside.

Like his resentment at how his father, Ride (Stephen Sarrazin) a retired bio-tech researcher, insists on conducting monthly blood tests on Anthony and Tom, Anthony's son. Ride claims he wants to make sure that Anthony and Tom aren't developing leukemia or other diseases. Anthony has tried to convince Ride that they can get those kinds of tests with their regular health care provider, but Ride insists. Ride's wife, Mitsue (Yuko Nakamura), died from some sort of inherited illness. Ride seems to believe that only he can keep his son and grandson healthy from the ravages of inherited disease.

Anthony is walking back from his father's place to his apartment with his son while talking on the phone with Yuriko when an economy car comes zooming down a tunnel. Anthony tells Tom to get out of the road, to stand against the wall. The car comes to a halt a few feet from Anthony. The driver is in shadow. There's something menacing about this vehicle. A father's worst fears are realized when the car backs up at high speed and runs Tom down. Anthony runs after the car, helpless to stop this new nightmare unfolding in waking life, and sees something both horrific and strange: a little arm is reaching out from underneath the front end of the car, fingers grasping the grill of the murderous economy car. The arm is seemingly mutilated, but maybe it's just transformed . . . into the same awful consistency of the molten slag face of the child Anthony and Yuriko both saw in their nightmares. A new vision of horror: steaming blood pours from beneath the car. But the blood looks more like liquid metal . . .

Anthony feels something exploding inside himself. He flips out, his body twitching and vibrating, going into a kind of dance. The crashing music seems to signal the loosing of some strange, awful power, and a new Tetsuo is born!

Much as in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, the man of metal in Tetsuo the Bullet Man is also born of rage at the murderous loss of his son. This homicidal act also echos the act of vehicular assault which created the Metal Fetishist in the original Tetsuo the Iron Man. Does filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto have a fear of being run over by a car? Maybe so. I recall reading somewhere that Tsukamoto rides a bicycle, and so maybe he feels some anxiety at being run down by some monstrous machine (bicycles also figure prominently in Tsukamoto's films Bullet Ballet and Nightmare Detective). There's also the tragedy of a parent losing a child. This seems to be a concern which has grown out of Tsukamoto's real world development from a single  auteur filmmaker to an auteur filmmaker with a wife and children who keeps one foot in the world of advertising and for-hire filmmaking. Tsukamoto's movies always seem to reflect his personal obsessions and concerns even when they are works of pure fantasy. Indeed, Tsukamoto's fantasies are never just that. Fantastic powers and mutations come at the potential loss of one's sanity, bodily integrity, and the peril of mass destruction.

This peril of mass destruction is something Tsukamoto seems to have an ambivalent relationship with in the Tetsuo movies. Tetsuo the Iron Man seemed to embrace the annihilation of the old world, as embodied by the city of Tokyo, as something to be celebrated. A lone metal fetishist pursues a milquetoast salaryman with the intention of inspiring uncontrolled mutation and ultimate creative destruction. It also had a sexual element: the unleashing of destructive powers was seemingly some sort of atomic orgasm combined with infectious psychic mutations of the libido. Tetsuo II: Body Hammer involved a whole cult of metal fetishists organized with the purpose of tormenting a salaryman into remembering his secret past. Tetsuo II also addressed the destruction of Tokyo as a necessity, perhaps to make the world safe for parents and offspring. It was to be an end to all wars of mutation, as it were, since it was the city of Tokyo itself, born out of cutthroat capitalism and high technology, that required men of flesh to become men of metal to keep up the pace of production.

In all of these Tetsuo movies, the mutations are triggered by a figure known as The Guy, or Yatsu. (I'm guessing Yatsu must mean 'guy' or 'person.') The Guy, or "That Guy!" as Anthony refers to him at one point, is always played by Shinya Tsukamoto, perhaps as an on-camera manifestation of his behind the lens role as director and mastermind of the on screen carnage. Tsukamoto seems to be saying that each of these movies is a kind of experiment where the author/director is tormenting some poor protagonist to provoke a radical evolutionary response, to become a monster, and always for sinister purposes. The Guy's motives are tied to his resentment of the modern edifice of Tokyo, and perhaps reflect Tsukamoto's dark side as an artist.

Tsukamoto in real life is both an artist with a taste for the dark side and a hardworking family man. These movies seem to be explorations of these sometimes conflicting roles. The provocative artist side of him desires to transform reality, to defeat crass consumerism, and blow minds to bits. The family man side of him has bills to pay, responsibilities to shoulder, and people to love and protect. It's almost like two different personae reside within the same man. One has a serious resentment towards the structures and strictures of 21st century capitalist society, and the other depends on them. Tsukamoto uses these movies to play out these conflicts, and to show the price paid no matter where we fall on the destruction/dependence spectrum.

The Bullet Man is also a creature responding to the pain and cruelty of the world, the world as played by Tokyo. In this movie, the Bullet Man is besieged by grief, a wife who is angry that he let their son die, and the heavily armed contractors of a sinister corporation. Powerful interests want to make this Bullet Man go away, but this new Tetsuo won't go down without a fight. As Anthony's mutation progresses, he becomes a roaring, slag encrusted war machine, bristling with cannons, and enraged by his inability to control his transformations.

Interestingly, and perhaps inspired by American comic book superheroes, the Bullet Man tries his best not to kill people, only to wound and disable them. This creates some dark comedy when the Bullet Man battles the Blackwater-style contractors. Instead of executing them outright, he just settles for blowing off their arms and legs to calm them down. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

The Guy, once again incarnated by Tsukamoto, is the driver of the murderous economy car. He knows what Anthony is hiding inside, and wants to bring it out into the open. The Guy tortures Anthony with menacing phone calls and emails. It's a tribute to Tsuakmoto's skill as a director that he is able to conjure menace from economy cars, cell phones, and emails. Part of it is how he directs the movie to put the audience into Anthony's disturbed mental state, but a large portion of the movie's intensity comes from Chu Ishikawa's epic score and sound design. This is a movie which constantly rumbles with ambient menace, and impacts with furious percussion. I can't adequately describe it, it's just something you have to experience. Crank up the volume on this one.

The Guy, who in this movie is presented as some sort of corporate saboteur, has something special in mind for the Bullet Man, something unexpectedly grand and ambitious. It's not the unbridled sexual anarchy of Tetsuo the Iron Man, nor is it solely the revelation of dark secrets from the past, as in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. It has partially to do with unveiling the past and something else which I won't reveal. But I would say it's rather a clever twist on the surreal logic of the Tetsuo movies. It makes me wonder what Tsukamoto has in mind for Tetsuo 4, and, yes, I do hope he makes a fourth one.

First time leading man Eric Bossick gets put through his paces on this one. I gather from his IMDB profile that he has done voice overs  and motion capture for video games such as Silent Hill 4, and that he has had  roles on Japanese television dramas. There's also a great picture on his IMDB page of Bossick, Tsukamoto, and Robert De Niro together at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bossick is no replacement for Tomorrwo Taguchi  who so memorably embodied the previous two men of metal, and I don't think he's meant to be. Bossick brings more of a fragile, wounded dimension to the Bullet Man. But he is also quite convincingly crazed and fearsome, and a helluva sport to be buried under the elaborate molting slag make-up and costuming prostheses.

The Bullet Man is also a triumph of make-up and practical effects. To watch it go through it's different transformations is quite impressive. As the Bullet Man molts and mutates, his wife Yuriko has the opportunity to show tenderness towards this monster, evoking some version of Beauty and the Beast. The scene of Yuriko pulling the molted chunks of slab from Anthony's head is unexpectedly moving. And The Bullet Man's final form suggests a wholly new and terrifying frontier for the Tetsuo franchise . . . but you'll just have to see for yourself.

It should be noted that this film is mostly in English, with only a few lines of dialogue in Japanese. This was done, I guess, to try and increase its commercial viability in the United States and other English speaking markets. The effect is uneven. All of the Japanese cast members are clearly speaking their lines based on phonetic memorization, and the effect is rather artificial. Bossick has no problem with the English, and Tsukamoto's scenes with English dialogue are played for perverse humorous effect, and that compensates somewhat for the lack of fluency, but the overall impact is less than perfect. But it does give the movie a strange sound and feel. The dialogue itself is not bad, actually, and shows a good deal of finesse, it's just the delivery is off, and I feel that it puts the obviously talented Japanese cast members at a bit of a disadvantage. But Tsukamoto makes a skilled go of it.

It comes off better than what was attempted in 2007's Sukiyaki Western Django, which was a mash-up of Spaghetti Westerns and samurai movies directed by Takashi Miike. In that movie, all of the dialogue was recorded in phonetically memorized English, and it was all thoroughly ludicrous. The movie featured a hugely talented cast, and some memorably orchestrated carnage, but the dialogue was almost incomprehensible and undercut the whole endeavor. I had to watch it with English subtitles. Tetsuo the Bullet Man deploys it's dialogue much more effectively. Even if you don't catch every last word, the flow of the story, and the emotions of the characters are all pretty easy to follow.

Tetsuo the Bullet Man is a worthy entry in Tsukamoto's surrealistic ongoing saga of rage, mutation, and creative destruction, played out against Tokyo, that high-tech edifice of civilization. Watching it reminded me of a line of dialogue from an earlier Tsukamoto film, Bullet Ballet, where one of the characters referred to Tokyo as a dream. The character, a drug dealing gangster and junkie, seemed to suggest that the mainstream society of civilization and laws was an illusion, and that it was the underground, outlaw existence which was real. Of course, one must consider the source of this bit of druggie philosophy, but the Tetsuo movies seem to be concerned with a similar inquiry:

Is civilization the dream, the fantasy? Is ultimate reality the mutant of rage inside the human heart? Does it take a radical act of creative destruction to unleash reality? Or can we choose our reality, be it civilization or unbridled chaos and war?

MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER (1992)

Starring
Tomorowo Taguchi as Tomoo Taniguchi
Nobu Kanaoka as Kana
Keinosuke Tomioka as Minori
Shinya Tsukamoto as Yatsu (The Guy)
Hideaki Tezuka as Big Skinhead
Tomoo Asada as Young Skinhead
Torauemon Utazawa as Mad Scientist


Writer/Director/Co-Producer/Art Director/Co-Cinematographer 
Shinya Tsukamoto


Original Music by Chu Ishikawa
Special Effects by Takashi Oda
Cinematography by Fumikazu Oda, Katsunori Yokoyama
Produced by Hiromi Aihara, Hiroshi Koizumi, Fumio Kurokawa, Fuminori Shishido, Nobuo Takeuchi
A Kaijyu Theatre Production 

...

"I don't want money. Destruction is all I need."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A drunken salaryman staggers through a subterranean underpass somewhere in the bowels of Tokyo. The camera, slasher movie style, seems to stalk him, putting the audience in a first person POV. A hand, the hand of the stalker, makes a gun and pretend shoots the salaryman. The salaryman is irritated by these juvenile shenanigans, but not for long. Two loud bangs, and bullets drill into his torso. He slumps to the ground, one of the comparatively few people in Tokyo who will be classified as a gun homicide that year.

The stalker is revealed in a reverse angle shot as a strange man with a smoking arm attended by an awestruck young man with a shaved head. The stalker seems to be pretending that his arm is some kind of gun. What kind of pretend results in actual bullets and an actual dead body, though, seems to be the question at hand . . .

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer resurrects the themes and imagery of the first Tetsuo movie, but dials back the surrealism a little bit. Or maybe it dials it up to eleven. I guess it depends on how you reckon such things. The first Tetsuo movie was a creation of pure sensation and outrageous imagery with little regard for the usual film grammar and character motivations. There was a story, and there were characters, but these things were subordinate to the overall spectacle of uncontrolled psychic and biological mutations. No motivations or causes are given for the wild transformations in the first movie, and Tetsuo II is comparably mysterious, but the sequel offers more of a science fictional rationale for the mutations. They are seemingly tied to rage, to deadly threats to one's survival, and memories of the past long suppressed.

In the world of Tetsuo II, mutation is also a matter of applied willpower. From the wellsprings of one's rage, one can focus thoughts into mutagenic agents.  An arm and a hand can be morphed into a cannon. Soft flesh becomes layers  of breathing, sweating steel. The most advanced mutants can seemingly manifest concrete as well as steel to further armor up against all enemies. Such thoughts can also be focused into a magnetic field, like Magneto in the X-Men comics, and used defensively and offensively against other metal mutants. Tetsuo II brings an amusing comic book logic to the story which makes it more of a traditional narrative experience than the first movie. Some people I've talked to don't like this aspect of Tetsuo II, and prefer the pure lunacy of the first movie which was totally unbounded by narrative and logic. In fact, it seems that many people were let down by Tetsuo II. Maybe I'm too much of a fan to see this movie in a harsh critical light, but I've always found Tetsuo II to be commendably ambitious. It takes the notions of mutation and creative destruction out of the purely internal, surrealistic mode of the first movie and amplifies them into instruments of mass destruction. In the sequel, it would seem that anybody has the potential to grok the Tetsuo state of mind.

Tomorowo Taguchi is back for another round of mutation and creative destruction as the suit and glasses stiff who transforms into the Iron Man when pushed to the limit by a mysterious tormentor. Shinya Tsukamoto writes, directs, operates the camera when he's not in front of it, art directs, edits, and incarnates a new version of his metal fetishist character from Tetsuo, the Iron Man.

 In the first Tetsuo film, the characters were broad types sketched in by enthusiastic actors. This time around, the characters are given a little bit more in the way of human details and specifics. Taguchi's character is given a name, Tomoo Taniguchi, and a chic apartment in ultramodern Tokyo. He shares it with his wife, Kana, who is played by Nobu Kanaoka. Kanaoka had a cameo as a woman possessed by a piece of biomechanical scrap metal in the first movie. Tomoo and Kana have a young son, Minori, and to all appearances their lives are not the stuff that films are made of, seeing as they live in a comfortable home and even sleep together in an adorable cuddle every night. Tomoo's got a secure job, presumably in some cubicle warren in some skyscraper, and Kana is a devoted mother, preparing breakfast each morning, and encouraging her husband to exercise regularly. Their apartment is a modernist refuge from the biological and technological chaos of the living city. Tomoo makes his way to his office job, wearing a dorky little backpack like a student, on foot and by bullet train and during these trips he is portrayed as having some bizarre anxiety, some sense of being engulfed by the city and its crowds, and yet also passed by, maybe even superseded . . . Tsukamoto shoots Taguchi standing still and staring into the camera as the crowds, backs to the camera, rush by him on the subway platform at high speed. Taguchi, as Tomoo, seems to be standing still, and yet vibrating with repressed energy at the same time. He has a power he wants to unleash, but can't tap into it. He's been too rundown by the workaday grind, by easy living, and he can only sense in an oblique fashion the potential within him.

Tomoo, Kana, and Minori are at the shopping mall one day when they run into a pair of trenchcoated lunatics. One of them zaps Tomoo with some kind of injection gun, and then snatches Minori. Tomoo staggers around in shock and pain, while Kana zips off after the kidnappers. Tomoo finds his way to the mall rooftop where he has the shit knocked out of him by the kidnappers, one of whom sadistically dangles him over the side of the building, while the other one threatens to throw Minori from the roof. But the kidnappers back away at the last moment, leaving Tomoo hanging off the building's ledge like a hero in some old silent film. Kana rescues him at the last moment, pulling him to safety, and they see that Minori has been left behind.

What the fuck was that all about? Were they really kidnappers? Maybe yakuza? Or were they were just particularly sick pranksters? Kana pressures Tomoo to start pumping iron at the gym, maybe to be able to better fend off the rising tide of punks and criminals infesting Tokyo these days. Tomoo can't lift the weights at first, but then he thinks of the leering faces of the thugs who assaulted him and his family, and he finds himself to be stronger than he thought. Next, he hits the workout bike, and his breath capacity and leg muscles have all been augmented by Tomoo's rich inner vein of rage, fear, and paranoia. Is Tomoo on a trajectory to become Tokyo's version of Paul Kersey?

Meanwhile, in the depths of an iron foundry, a small army of cultish skin heads lift gigantic weights crafted from discarded scrap metal and chunks of concrete. Fire and smoke and liquid metal pour from demonic apparatus, and the skinheads are seemingly trying to make their bodies over in the image of junk and machines. The kidnappers are revealed to be agents of this cult, and they hand their strange injection gun over to a portly mad scientist direct from central casting for maintenance. The leader of this cult, played by Shinya Tsukamoto, appears to be the shooter from the opening: a man with a scarred lip who luxuriates in a Jacuzzi filled with molten metal. The kidnappers describe Tomoo as a "mild specimen" and suggest that they have injected him with some kind of substance which will transform him. Tomoo is, perhaps, the subject of some sort of bizarre experiment.

The kidnappers strike again, stealing Minori from Kana and Tomoo's apartment. Tomoo gives chase, ending up on the apartment building's roof. He battles one of the kidnappers, who taunts him by telling him that he threw Minori off the roof. Tomoo goes berserk, and he mutates his right arm into a long, penile cannon straight out of the H.R. Giger calender. Tomoo blasts away . . . and ends up obliterating his own son, whom the kidnapper uses as a human shield. Kana witnesses this accidental homicide, and begins to see her hubby as some kind of monster.

The cult then kidnaps Tomoo, taking him to their lair in the iron foundry, and hooking him up to some sort of bizarre machine that looks like a BDSM version of virtual reality gear. The mad scientist,  at the direction of the cult leader, probes Tomoo's mind, and agitates his memories of the kidnappers and the death of Minori. These memories are like some sort of malignancy, and the mad scientist encourages them to grow and colonize more of Tomoo's consciousness. These cancerous thoughts give Tomoo a jolt of rage, which causes his body to begin to mutate into a living weapon, bristling with bouquets of penile cannons. Tomoo yells and screams in supreme agony, and fires his cannon appendages indiscriminately in the armored testing facility. The cult leader and the mad scientist are satisfied with their new creation. The mad scientist speculates they can use this new process of induced mutation to make piles of money enabling customers to transform themselves and others into screaming, writhing, bio-mechanical weapons batteries.

The cult leader isn't interested in money, though. His stake in the project is highly personal. For he and Tomoo share a secret history that the salaryman has all but forgotten. But the cult leader has forgotten nothing. He seeks not only to mutate Tomoo, but to reawaken his buried memories.

Tomoo's mutations progress into wilder, outsize forms. Eventually, he resembles a kind of lopsided golem fashioned from mud, concrete, and steel. His mutations increase as the cult leader agitates them by dropping hints of their buried past together, and threatening Kana's life. One of the dilemmas that Tomoo faces is that as he mutates and increases his power, he seemingly must struggle to control his destructive tendencies. Sure, he can kill and destroy property at will, but he cannot save any of the people he cares about, and  these frustrations only amplify his rage. Usually, in films about people with superpowers, the powers they gain or are granted are used to increase their agency, and to do good. But in the twisted universe of Tetsuo II, the powers come at great cost. One's body is subjected to out of control transformations, and it is all but impossible to unleash the powers within without causing massive unintentional casualties.

There is also a nasty rust disease which can afflict those who decide to unleash their inner Tetsuo. The cult leader starts using the injector gun on his skinhead disciples, and the war with Tomoo escalates.

Tetsuo II suggests that the mutational process can be guided, maybe even controlled and transformed into a commodity. Such a reproducible mutation process could even be co-opted by extremist political elements. The skinhead cult seems to exist as some kind of fascistic organization, all the members of which have been recruited from boxers, bodybuilders, and other devotees of physical culture. The leader seems to see such people as prime candidates for mutation. His motivations are murky, but he seems to have some aim beyond tormenting Tomoo. The imagery of the skinhead cultists and their willingness to be mutated into living weapons suggests some resurgence of Japan's militaristic past.

There is also a theme running through the movie that the city of Tokyo itself is somehow a repressive force, one that is ambiguous: it is the fruit of Japan's struggle to rebuild itself and thrive after World War II, and is therefore an improvement upon the imperialism which once led the country to total destruction. Everyone is employed, well-fed, and safe. But much of this security has a hidden cost. Society is ruled by powerful corporate interests. The common citizen is expected to practically kill themselves to make good grades in school and land in a plum corporate office job. Those that don't make the grade can look forward to a life of manual labor or maybe something in the service industry. Not everyone fits into such a conformist society. Tsukamoto, as a nonconforming artist, rather perversely suggests that there are those who would choose to obliterate such a society almost as an act of creative expression.

Tetsuo II is that rare fantasy movie that doesn't deal in simplistic conflicts between good and evil. In this reality, comic book superpowers offer their own peculiar kind of bondage. Men of metal suffer from rusty leprosy. Painful memories metastasize into psychic cancer. A sinister tormentor may organize a cult only to get you to remember what you've forgotten. And maybe that tormentor is a psychopathic murderer willing to put your family's lives at stake, but shouldn't any lover of truth be willing to go the distance? Moreover, in the world of Tetsuo, the most dangerous WMD is not a nuke or a biological agent or a bunker busting bomb. It is the rage simmering within the human heart. After all, isn't it that rage, combined with fear, hatred, and distrust, which builds the weapons and wages the wars?

MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO, THE IRON MAN (1989)

Directed by/Edited by/Art Direction by/Produced by Shinya Tsukamoto

Cinematography by Shinya Tsukamoto and Kei Fujiwara

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Costume Designs by Kei Fujiwara

Starring

Tomorowo Taguchi as Man

Kei Fujiwara as Woman

Nobu Kanaoka as Woman In Glasses

Naomasa Musaka as Doctor

Renji Ishibashi as Tramp

Shinya Tsukamoto as Metal Fetishist

A Kaijyu Theatre Production


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"Undisciplined self-penetration is no liberation, but is perceived as a form of biological chaos."

-Jerzy Grotowski
...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

I first saw Tetsuo, the Iron Man when I was a freshman in high school. The cover of the VHS box on the Blockbuster shelf had some bug-eyed metallic looking dude on the cover that reminded me of the Golem from those ancient silent movies. The back of the box talked about a guy who worshiped metal. It hinted at mutation and destruction. I thought it was maybe related to the anime epic Akira. Anyone who's ever seen and loved Akira is unlikely to forget the name of Tetsuo, or Kaneda for that matter. Nor or they likely to forget the spectacular biological and psionic meltdowns that make that movie so memorable. The image of the metallic man and the idea of humanity and machine merging also evoked in me memories of Robocop and the live action 8-Man movie I had seen recently. I can't remember if I rented this movie with my father or if I went and got it by myself. Either way, I was the only person in my household interested in watching it.

I was a privileged kid. I had my own room, my own TV and VCR, my own Super Nintendo Entertainment System, my NES was still functional, and I even had a Sega CDX which was a compact combination of the Sega Genesis and the Sega CD. I sat, alone in my bedroom, sitting through trailers for obscure foreign films. I don't remember what any of those movies were, but they all looked, with a few exceptions, a lot more interesting than anything I'd seen at the actual movie theatre in my short lifespan.

In middle school, just a year or two before, I had discovered the movies of John Woo and Akira Kurosawa and Jackie Chan and Wong Kar-Wai, so I fancied myself knowledgeable about world cinema. Anime movies like Akira, Golgo 13, and Fist of the North Star fueled my adolescent fantasies of retribution and annihilation. I'd also discovered the joys of George A. Romero and his outrageous zombie epics. I was hungry for gore, guns that fired endlessly and only needed to be reloaded when it looked cool, and flesh eating hordes of shopping mall assholes looking to tear people's guts out. I wanted psychokinetic showdowns between enraged adolescents that would sunder the universe. I wanted heavily armed heroes punctured by hundreds of bullets whirling through the air in slow motion, geysering blood from every wound. I wanted samurai in full armor slicing enemies in half and acrobatic martial artists who never take a break to catch their breath or get a sip of water. I wanted pure sensation.

Well, I was about to get what I wanted and then some.

I don't even remember understanding Tetsuo, the Iron Man the first time I saw it. In fact, the opening imagery of the lone man walking through some kind of scrap yard to his hideout was so off-kilter and obscure that I had a hard time telling what was happening. The movie was shot in blasted out black and white, everything looked like it was taking place in the presence of some harsh, blinding light. I could tell that a guy was sitting in the middle of all manner of metallic scrap. He had pictures of Olympic runners cut out of magazines stuck to various bits of metal junk. There's a strange, insistent beat, like someone pounding a metallic surface with an electrified steel rod, or maybe a lightsaber switched to bludgeon mode. The guy is sitting with his metal junk, breathing heavy, and he starts cutting on the inside of his thigh, stabbing with some sharp metal object, making the blood flow. He's mutilating himself in time to the strange music. And then he decides to put a metal pipe or something into the wound in his leg. He goes running out of his hideout and gets hit by a car. 1950s prom music starts to play. The self-mutilator sees the words NEW WORLD emblazoned on the grill of the car that has run him down. Cue title card.

And then there's a guy in a suit and glasses, a real square looking dude. The beat picks up, grows more insistent. A light strobes on and off, and then the square looking dude starts flailing around, doing a kind of jerky slamdance. Sweat, or maybe liquid metal, goes flying in all directions. I was left with the sensation of a great power manifesting. That this guy in the suit and glasses was about to unleash some destructive energy or something.

But I was confused the first time I saw it. I thought the guy mutilating himself and the guy in the suit and glasses were the same person. The style of shooting and editing were so radically different from the movies I was used to watching that I didn't understand everything that was happening. There were people doing things, violent, forceful, perverse things, and there was music, and there was a sense of momentum. But it was all so different, in a grammatical sense, than the movies I was used to watching. There were no conventional establishing shots, no obvious musical cues to indicate who the good guys and the bad guys were, it was just sensation, rhythm and power. It compelled me even as it confused me.

Later, even stranger things start to happen. The guy in the suit and glasses is standing on a subway platform and gets chased by a woman who is seemingly possessed by a strange piece of metallic junk. The suit-and-glasses guy escapes, but seems to have a kind of bizarre private life. He has weird metal shit growing out of his cheek. He tries to cut the spur off with his shaving razor, but his skin breaks splattering blood all over the sink and mirror. The skin gives out, but the metal spur abides. The suit-and-glasses guy has a hallucination where his girlfriend transforms into some kind of burlesque dancer with a robot snake for a penis. His girlfriend does a kind of bump and grind number, and then anally penetrates him with the robot snake penis.

And then the suit-and-glasses guy starts transforming into a metallic monster. The metal is growing out of his body, plating him over in layers. It causes him great pain. He sprouts a high-powered drill for a penis and chases his girlfriend around their tiny house. Is this retribution for his fantasy of being raped by his girlfriend's non-existent robot snake penis? What kind of fucked-up logic is that? Mr. Suit-and-Glasses seems to be going through some changes. Like, Ozzy Osbourne kinds of changes.

But then, a new tormentor appears: the self-mutilator from the opening of the film. It seems he's been the mastermind behind all of these bizarre mutations and hallucinations. The self-mutilator, or metal fetishist, has some strange psycho-kinetic powers that allows him to manipulate human minds and machines. He also is seemingly having an impact on the normal course of human biology, causing organic cells and metal to merge and form a strange and sinister new partnership. This master manipulator also wears some wild-ass stage makeup, and seemingly has a burning attraction for Mr. Suit-and-Glasses. But it's not your usual kind of courtship. The metal fetishist and Mr. Suit-and-Glasses both start to manifest psychic powers and layers of armored skin, and they engage in a combination duel-to-the-death/courtship dance with heavy-duty sadomasochistic over and undertones.

This was all something I had definitely never seen before. I was glad I was watching the movie alone. Not that my parents ever really cared what I watched or did not watch, but I felt like I was watching something forbidden, something taboo. It was awesome! Mom and Dad hanging out would've killed the buzz.

In fact, I can only remember a handful of times my father ever warned me against watching something. One time when I was a kid and we had rented The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I believe this was sometime in elementary school. My father didn't think it was appropriate that his little son should hear the toilet humor oneupsmanship between Andrew Dice Clay and Gilbert Gottfried. He stopped the movie, and then sent me to bed. But minutes later, I heard him firing up the movie. You see, my father always thought he was being slick by watching trashy movies late at night when everyone was supposed to be asleep, but he always cranked the volume just a bit too loud. I guess his hearing wasn't so great after years of servicing jet engines on the flight decks of aircraft carriers. This act of parental responsibility struck me as doubly unjust: not only was my father watching what he had forbidden me to watch, but he was also a thoroughly foul-mouthed ex-sailor. By the time I was eight years old I had heard every conceivable swear word, racial slur, and insulting epithet imaginable. And this guy had the gall to be offended by the juvenile posturing of a second-rater like the Diceman?

On another occasion, my father warned me against watching Killing Zoe, an ultraviolent bank robbery/hostage crisis thriller set in Paris, France. The villain of the movie, and the most memorable character, is a raging psychopath who gleefully shoots unarmed women in the mouth and has no concern with whether he or his gang survive their latest caper. He is self-destruction incarnate. This villain is also an intravenous drug user. And it was this last character trait that worried my father.

"They do some stupid stuff in this movie," my father grimly intoned. "I don't want you to ever do any of that stuff, okay?"

"What do they do?"

"Well, there's a lot of shooting drugs in that movie. Just real stupid stuff that I don't want you to ever do, all right?"

"Um, yeah, okay."

But mi paterfamilias didn't forbid me from watching the movie. Nor did he object to the chief villain's maniacal disregard for human life. No, there was no admonition to never resort to violence to solve life's problems, "I never want you to pick up a gun, my son, or ever strike out in anger at your fellow human beings!" No. None of that. My father, the wannabe role model, had no problems with women getting shot in the mouth, or the wholesale slaughter of a building full of people by automatic weapons fire. Nope. He was hung up on the drugs. "Just Say No!" My father was momentarily inhabited by the mind of Nancy Reagan.

But then again, my father and I had watched plenty of ultraviolent movies together. Schwarzenegger, Dirty Harry, westerns, Indiana Jones, the kinds of movies where one tough dude wipes out legions of bad guys. My father never batted an eye. But God forbid Dirty Harry fool around with a joint, or Indy Jones get addicted to pain killers. Think about it. Dirty Harry hung out in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a high stress personality type. You don't go around with that Clint Eastwood-type look on your face and not have an ulcer. Dirty Harry probably hit up all kinds of chemical mood enhancers. And Indy Jones? The dude got dragged under a military truck at high speed. He got the shit knocked out of him by the big, bald Nazi scumbag at the airfield. He's been shot a couple times, if memory serves. Yeah, I think Indy Jones was on the road to pill-popperdom.

My father never raised any objections to any of this mayhem. In fact, he would sometimes regale me with one of his favorite Vietnam stories: Puff the Magic Dragon. You know, the plane with the heavy machine guns that mowed down scores of Vietnamese? According to Dad, there were fields of shredded corpses, punctured many times over by high impact ordinance. I suppose war does that to people, warps their sense of morality and decency. Knocks their priorities into disarray.

But then again, I was never sure if that was a bullshit story or not. Later, when I sat through the John Wayne fiasco The Green Berets, I thought, "Hey, wait a minute. Did my father actually see the mayhem, or did he just crib it from this laughable movie?" Hey, Ronnie Reagan confused real life and the movies all the time, and he was the goddamn President.

. . . but wasn't I talking about Tetsuo, the Iron Man?

Yeah, I guess my point is that part of the thrill of watching Tetsuo was its taboo imagery, its sheer weirdness. The sure knowledge that this was a movie Ma and Pa would never dare to watch, let alone comprehend. And if ever they did try to watch it, they'd just wrinkle their beetling brows, and pout their simian lips and say things like, "I don't get this," and "Who's the main character here?" and "Wouldn't I be happier if I just turned on the TV?" I could watch Tetsuo and feel cool and superior.

I get it, dude, and I wanna go hang out with other people who get it!

Except, I didn't get it. Not completely. Why, exactly, was everybody mutating and hallucinating? Was it magic? Was it psionic powers? Even Akira, a movie often noted for its strangeness and ambiguity, had a rationale for its mass destruction, mutations, and psychic battles that put it more in line with science fiction epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and scores of dystopian sci-fi novels. Was it all a dream-within-a-dream? And what about all the kinky sexual stuff? Was this meant to be a parable about a button down, suit-and-tie kind of guy who discovers his repressed homosexuality? Or was this a movie looking to blast away all our tired notions of sexuality and identity and forge a bold and terrifying new path? Why did it look so weird?

Yeah, the movie just had this jerky, stop motion vibe to it that made it look and feel unlike anything I'd seen up to that point. All of the animations in the movie were done with poverty budget stop motion animation which lent the film a strange look, a handmade feel. Even though the movie was nowhere near as slick as the latest Hollywood special effects extravaganzas, and wouldn't even bear comparisons with Star Wars or Star Trek, it's very rough look actually lent it more credibility. The movie seemed to be about people living in a world filled with junk and waste, and how they merge with this refuse. It made a bizarre kind of sense that the movie would look and feel kind of clunky and rundown. I dunno, it's hard to pin it down in words.

Another aspect of it is its soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa. When I first saw this movie, not only was it unlike anything I had ever seen, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. The music drove the movie with crazed percussion and relentless rhythm that evoked both machine like regularity and precision and out of control mutation and biological chaos. It evoked a musical sense, as though it were just as much a concert as a movie. But not your run of the mill, tapped-out rock'n'roll bullshit. No, this was a new mutation of sound and image and momentum.

Maybe I could compare it to opera. Because the voices of the performers were important, too. Not because they recited soul-searching monologues, or engaged in witty exchanges, but because they screamed incoherently, breathed heavily as they mutilated themselves, and let loose battle cries and threats of destruction against the fabric of the universe itself. Yeah, it was like opera. In opera, you have talented singers doing highly unnatural, intense things with their voices that sound majestic, emotionally charged, yet aloof. Well, maybe I shouldn't compare it to opera, in that case. The performers in Tetsuo work it more like punk rock performers or loonies in the bin. Let's just forget the comparison to opera . . .

I've watched this movie many times since high school. Every time I watch it, it makes more sense. That's not to say that it offers any pat solutions or clear cut character motivations, but that nowadays, when I watch it, I get it. I grok its crazy grammar. Things which just seemed random and opaque the first few times I saw it, are now revealed as having a twisted visual and sonic logic powering them.

For example: the use of grainy video as a sign of the metal fetishist's psychic powers. The metal fetishist seems to be broadcasting his memories and willpower into various machines, and into the mind of Mr. Suit-and-Glasses. It's partly how the fetishist goes about tormenting people, but it's also his way of communicating his past. The fetishist wants Mr. Suit-and-Glasses to know about his rather bizarre trauma at the hands of a belligerent hobo with a metal club. Apparently, when he was a child, the fetishist's head was bashed in with a metal rod by some strange, crazed wanderer. It is possibly implied that this tramp was the fetishist's father, but this could be some sort of hallucination, or fantasy. Maybe the fetishist no longer remembers his own past, and how he became a mutant and so he has manufactured his own memories, or fantasies, about how he came to be. Just because someone has superpowers doesn't mean they're sane or that they recall things accurately.

In any case, the use of distorted video seems to signify the presence of the fetishist's memories, and his psychic powers in action. I never got that the first few times I saw it. Now, I get it . . . I think.

Tomorow Taguchi plays Mr. Suit-and-Glasses. True cinematic auteur Shinya Tsukamoto plays the metal fetishist. Kei Fujiwara plays Mr. Suit-and-Glasses's girlfriend. Taguchi is an actor who would become familiar to me from later Tsukamoto films, and also other Japanese movies, particular the films of Takashi Miike. Taguchi gives a totally committed performance as the anoymous suit-and-glasses dude, jerking his body with abandon during the surrealistic dance sequences, and growling and yelling with appropriate fervor and menace when he begins to mutate. He would reprise this role in Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer.

Kei Fujiwara also gives herself over to the crazed and sexually out of control burlesque woman with the robot snake penis. Fujiwara would later go on to direct bizarre horror movies herself. She also helped shoot this movie, and contributed to the memorable metal mutant designs.

Tsukamoto, as the metal fetishist, is enraged, power-crazed, sexually empowered, and just a bit goofy. The role of the scheming tormentor is one that he would reprise in a number of his later films, where his sinister machinations are seemingly bent on inspiring creative destruction conducive to rebirth within the psyches and souls of his protagonists. These tormentor roles are also possibly commenting on Tsukamoto's role as a perfectionist, totally independent film director. Could it be that he directs his actors to actually mutate? Maybe those aren't special effects at all . . .