Thursday, August 22, 2013

This Review is NSFW

Film: Tetsuo (Tetsuo, the Iron Man)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

What in the monkey hell did I just watch? I mean, I’ve seen some massively fucked up movies in my lifetime and have even enjoyed some of them, but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything weirder or less understandable than Tetsuo (sometimes called Tetsuo, the Iron Man). Before my comments are filled with, “But what about…?” I know there are weirder films out there than this one, but I haven’t seen them. The only way to describe this is as industrial pornography. That won’t make sense if you haven’t seen it. If you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Let’s see if I can make sense of this. I’m honestly not sure I can, but I’m game to try. We start with a man called the metal fetishist (director Shin’ya Tsukamoto) inserting a huge piece of metal into his leg lengthwise, sort of like a new femur. He passes out (from the pain, id’ guess) and when he wakes up, the wound is infested with maggots. This causes him to run out into the street where he is promptly run over by our unnamed main character (Tomorowo Taguchi).

The man and his unnamed girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) dump the body in a ravine and then have sex. It’s kind of implied that they have sex because they’ve just dumped the body in the ravine. Oh, but the fetishist isn’t dead, and he starts infecting the man. By “infecting,” I mean that pieces of metal start showing up in the man’s body, poking their way to the surface. He’s attacked by a woman on a train platform, and while the attack goes on, the woman becomes more and more encased in pieces of metal—all the work of our friend the fetishist.

Think that’s weird? We’ve barely started. The man has a dream in which his girlfriend becomes an exotic dancer and rapes him with an animated metal hose. When he wakes up, he discovers more and more metal on his body, but he pretends like nothing is wrong. Y’know, it’s easy to pretend nothing is wrong when half of your face has wires sticking out of it. He feeds his girlfriend to the sound of metal-on-metal sound effects and then (and I can’t believe I’m about to type these words), his cock turns into a power drill. They battle back and forth for some time until she impales herself on the drill-cock.

And then the fetishist returns, turns the man’s cats into hideously screaming mutant metal/cyborg cat monsters, like if the Borg assimilated cats but allowed their slow cousins to do the work. The fetishist then animates the body of the dead girlfriend, splits out of it, and the two fight. I won’t tell you how this ends. I’ll only say that the ending of this film makes about as much sense as the rest of it, which is to say none at all.

This is more or less a Japanese version of Eraserhead except that it’s not as coherent. It’s a live-action anime, and it contains everything I tend to dislike about anime. I always feel like I’m missing something cultural, like if I knew Japanese culture better, I’d understand not what is happening, but I’d be able to put the why it’s happening into some sort of context. Perhaps I’m wrong and Tetsuo is nothing more than an industrio-erotic pain fantasy. If that’s the case, okay. It still doesn’t make sense, but okay. What’s more disturbing to me is that I’m almost certain that somewhere and at some time director/metal fetishist Shin’ya Tsukamoto has wanked off to this film, and probably more than once, and probably at the scene where the girl impales herself on the cockdrill.

There’s a lot of stop motion work here, some of it interesting. There are some tricks done with the camera as well—we get a lot of sped up action and strange camera angles. But is it any good? Not really. It’s interesting for a little bit and it’s some of the weirdest shit I’ve ever seen, but that most certainly doesn’t make it any good.

Ultimately, here’s my takeaway from Tetsuo: other people’s sexual fetishes are weird. That this film is about sex may not be obvious, but there’s a lot of physical penetration by objects, a lot of combining and coupling, and the end is almost Brokebackian in its homoeroticism. This doesn’t even begin to mention the massive number of phallic objects, including the thing we see at the end slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Tetsuo is about Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s power drill cock. And based on that, it’s not worth the hour of your time it takes to watch it.

Why to watch Tetsuo: It’s a weird-ass trip.
Why not to watch: There is a very real sense that you are watching the director’s ideal pornography.

20 comments:

  1. First, and you probably knew this was coming... I think it's unfair to say this is like a live-action anime. This sounds WAY too absurd and incoherent to be anime. Like, even Akira wasn't this weird or off-the-wall.

    This film sounds like if David Lynch and Takashi Miike had a love child and that child made a movie.

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    1. You may be right, but there is a definite anime influence here. You'd have to see it to get what I mean by that. But for me, it was more the feeling I got from it was similar to the feeling I've gotten from some of the anime I've tried to watch/read.

      Lynch, yes. Miike, yes. Also Cronenberg with the body horror.

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    2. Now I wanna see a remake of Three Men and a Baby starring Lynch, Miike, and Cronenberg.

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  2. Wait, it's LESS coherent than Eraserhead? Holy Hell, I'm gonna hate this film.

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    1. Yeah, sorry. That's kind of hyperbole, but not really.

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  3. I agree that this is influenced by anime - adult anime. I referred to it one time as "a cross between Akira and Urotsukidoji, except live action, and even more incoherent." It's the adult anime films like Urotsukidoji that provide all the phallic symbols, especially the snake like probes.

    I say this without a hint of hyperbole: "Tetsuo is one seriously fucked up film and one of the very strangest I have ever seen."

    I gave it one star out of five, by the way. While I sometimes like the "what the fuck am I watching" moments (like with Repo: The Genetic Opera), I didn't with this one.

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    1. For the record, I hated Repo.

      There definitely is an anime influence here in the way the whole thing works. And your non-hyperbolic comment? I agree completely.

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    2. "For the record, I hated Repo."

      I kind of thought you might, not the least of which because it is an opera, so that's why I haven't ever recommended it to you despite the horror elements at play in it. I hadn't realized that you had already seen it.

      I actually do have a "What the Hell Did I Just Watch" aka "Seriously Messed Up Movies, But In A Good Way" category brainstormed with Repo as one of the ones I would recommend, but with a lot of caveats for people because it is just so far off the reservation. Oldboy is another in that category. I've already reviewed Man Bites Dog, but that would be a third.

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    3. I've not only seen Repo, I watched it twice on the recommendation that I'd appreciate it a lot more the second time. I didn't, although I will admit that I enjoyed watching Paris Hilton's face slide off at one point.

      There were too many problems with Repo, which is also why I haven't seen the non-musical sort-of remake Repo Men.

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    4. "I will admit that I enjoyed watching Paris Hilton's face slide off at one point."

      :-)

      Kudos for watching it twice after not liking it the first time. I can't say that I'd have been big enough to do that. If I hate a film it's usually "dead to me" thereafter. I have re-watched films that I didn't think were that special that later got praised to high heaven. I was wondering if I had missed something. I can't think of any that I decided were great after all, though.

      I haven't seen Repo Men, either, so I can't offer any guidance on it. I've read that it is not supposed to be connected to or based on Repo in any way; that another person just came up with a similar idea at around the same time, but I have my doubts about that.

      I've actually thought about having a category where I just review Repo Man, Repo: The Genetic Opera, and Repo Men, but since I've still never seen the latter I don't know if it will ever appear.

      If you've seen Repo twice you may remember this scene then. It was when the father, played by Paul Sorvino, is dancing/flipping down the aisle of the theater while singing to everyone that I literally had the "What the fuck am I watching" thought go through my head. It was with a smile on my face, though. :-)

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    5. The main problem I had with it was that I never bought into the premise. I'll buy into some weird shit for the sake of a good story, but with Repo, it just never worked for me. The whole premise just seemed...beyond the pale of anything remotely reasonable, interesting, or worth my time.

      I liked the song "Zydrate Anatomy," though. After all, Zydrate comes in a little glass vial.

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    6. And the little glass vial goes into the gun like a battery.

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    7. And the zydrate gun goes somewhere against her anatomy?

      (OK, I'll stop.)

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  4. (I *love* that this turned into a Repo: Genetic Opera discussion. Love that movie! And Chip--it was I who made him watch it twice. We did it for our podcast last year. He was not pleased. :P)

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    1. And he still talks to you? :-)

      Man, I really want to review it now just to get my thoughts about it "down on paper." Maybe I'll write it and sit on for the someday when I might use it.

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  5. I just watched the trailer for Tetsuo and even that brief snippet was enough to confirm what you've written. Dammit, this entire movie is on YouTube so I'm tempted. Yikes!

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    1. All I can say is brace yourself if you do watch it. Oh, and there are two sequels--Tetsuo: Body Hammer and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man.

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