Post by BENTMEN on Apr 10, 2002 0:13:40 GMT -5
TETSUO : THE IRON MAN
Film Review by Frank Coleman
TETSUO (Fox/Lorber) is a tender love story between an androgynous metamorphosing bionic demon and a man with a three-foot-long rotating iron penis. Sort of.
It's kind of hard to say what TETSUO is "about," actually. Roles, personae, points-of-view, sexual identities and both human and technical infrastructure are not so much reversed as all smooshed together in this bleak and disturbing vision. It appears that multiple actors play the same part, but even that's not certain, nor does it really matter. Director Shinya Tsukamoto has given us this, one of the "Regular-size Monster Series" the credits claim, as a sort of all-purpose allegory for the fall of just about everything,. The film is a symphonic tone poem of wires, soot, blood, latex, metal, speed and rust. But the greatest of these is rust. In this warped world, not only do people mutate, the by-product of the mutation falls apart as well.
Since the film is a wild cyclone of outrageous images and situations, it seems pointless to try to sequentially describe the "plot." Instead, here are some of the impressions, the resonances left behind:
A well-dressed Japanese dead ringer for David Byrne suddenly erupts into fits of spasmodic thrashing while his clothing rebels as if there were wild ferrets running around under his shirt. Later, a prim lady seated uncomfortably next to him in a train station spies a twisted hunk of metal, which happens to contain a hidden camera, lying on the floor. Curious, she reaches down to poke it with her pen and is suddenly transformed into an evil hell spawn with a mess of twisted resistors for a hand. She chases him down into the bowels of the station. One punch and it's out the door, up the stairs, out into the street and across town in hi-speed time-lapse to an anonymous garage in suburbia. She's right behind him. He's helpless, naked, on all fours on the floor. She does her kinky little dance, a six-foot-long cobra-like metallic snake/dick coiling out from her crotch towards him. She implants him, upgrades him if you will, rectally. There's a lot of screaming in this movie.
The guy stumbles through the trashy rubble after getting the roto-rooter treatment, howling in agony. "Ow...Ouch," say the subtitles. His girlfriend shrieks in horror at his newfound appendage, which he discovers one morning upon drilling a hole through the underside of the kitchen table while being aroused by her at breakfast. The rest of his body quickly erupts into a electronic mess of skin and plugs. He hides in the bathroom. One word of advise, friends, never try to pop a metal zit. She begs to be let in. "You're not going to like this," he says. More screams as she mashes the bottom of a hot frying pan into what's left of his face.
She sticks a knife in his throat and he collapses to the floor, his spinning willie finally stilled. She starts licking his face. He's not dead, though, only dreaming of a long-ago tryst with her in the woods. It's implied that this is a mutual hallucination. He awakens to find her lust for him has proven fatally irresistible. She has sat on him anyway. Unfortunately, his reverie having jump-started him, the wall behind her is now covered in bloody spray, lending new meaning to the term, "screw." She falls face first to the floor with a thud, and a black puddle leaks out of her mouth. He tenderly places her corpse in the bathtub, festooned with garlands.
A man in the TV set has been watching all this. "You've got a piece of metal stuck in your brain," he says. "Let's say it's artistically stuck there...think of it as an ornament." There is one hellacious fight scene after another, as Tetsuo tries to figure out why he's a) turning rapidly into a modern art sculpture and b) getting the crap kicked out of him by a gleefully vengeful hermaphrobot.
TETSUO is thankfully subtitled (dubbing would have ruined it), and in glorious black and white. There is a color sequel, TETSUO 2: BODY HAMMER, but reports on that one have been mixed. With it's epileptic pacing, technological subtext and unrelenting decay, it's easy to see why this one's become a favorite of the leather-clad broadband crowd.
The energy level of the film is remarkable, on a par with the most manic Chinese kung-fu horror epics. In fact, if TETSUO has any flaw at all, it's that it hits a hyperkinetic peak about half way through and spends the other half trying to sustain or top that, and can't. Still, it's one of the best and most original cult films since Videodrome, and is likely to be a party fave for some time to come. It even has a darkly humorous "happy" ending, and proves that a relationship need not be meaningful to be deep.
best,
FBC
F R A N K C O L E M A N
Member > BENTMEN
www.bentmen.com
Samurai Media Warlord > By Appointment Only
www.21ca.com
Film Review by Frank Coleman
TETSUO (Fox/Lorber) is a tender love story between an androgynous metamorphosing bionic demon and a man with a three-foot-long rotating iron penis. Sort of.
It's kind of hard to say what TETSUO is "about," actually. Roles, personae, points-of-view, sexual identities and both human and technical infrastructure are not so much reversed as all smooshed together in this bleak and disturbing vision. It appears that multiple actors play the same part, but even that's not certain, nor does it really matter. Director Shinya Tsukamoto has given us this, one of the "Regular-size Monster Series" the credits claim, as a sort of all-purpose allegory for the fall of just about everything,. The film is a symphonic tone poem of wires, soot, blood, latex, metal, speed and rust. But the greatest of these is rust. In this warped world, not only do people mutate, the by-product of the mutation falls apart as well.
Since the film is a wild cyclone of outrageous images and situations, it seems pointless to try to sequentially describe the "plot." Instead, here are some of the impressions, the resonances left behind:
A well-dressed Japanese dead ringer for David Byrne suddenly erupts into fits of spasmodic thrashing while his clothing rebels as if there were wild ferrets running around under his shirt. Later, a prim lady seated uncomfortably next to him in a train station spies a twisted hunk of metal, which happens to contain a hidden camera, lying on the floor. Curious, she reaches down to poke it with her pen and is suddenly transformed into an evil hell spawn with a mess of twisted resistors for a hand. She chases him down into the bowels of the station. One punch and it's out the door, up the stairs, out into the street and across town in hi-speed time-lapse to an anonymous garage in suburbia. She's right behind him. He's helpless, naked, on all fours on the floor. She does her kinky little dance, a six-foot-long cobra-like metallic snake/dick coiling out from her crotch towards him. She implants him, upgrades him if you will, rectally. There's a lot of screaming in this movie.
The guy stumbles through the trashy rubble after getting the roto-rooter treatment, howling in agony. "Ow...Ouch," say the subtitles. His girlfriend shrieks in horror at his newfound appendage, which he discovers one morning upon drilling a hole through the underside of the kitchen table while being aroused by her at breakfast. The rest of his body quickly erupts into a electronic mess of skin and plugs. He hides in the bathroom. One word of advise, friends, never try to pop a metal zit. She begs to be let in. "You're not going to like this," he says. More screams as she mashes the bottom of a hot frying pan into what's left of his face.
She sticks a knife in his throat and he collapses to the floor, his spinning willie finally stilled. She starts licking his face. He's not dead, though, only dreaming of a long-ago tryst with her in the woods. It's implied that this is a mutual hallucination. He awakens to find her lust for him has proven fatally irresistible. She has sat on him anyway. Unfortunately, his reverie having jump-started him, the wall behind her is now covered in bloody spray, lending new meaning to the term, "screw." She falls face first to the floor with a thud, and a black puddle leaks out of her mouth. He tenderly places her corpse in the bathtub, festooned with garlands.
A man in the TV set has been watching all this. "You've got a piece of metal stuck in your brain," he says. "Let's say it's artistically stuck there...think of it as an ornament." There is one hellacious fight scene after another, as Tetsuo tries to figure out why he's a) turning rapidly into a modern art sculpture and b) getting the crap kicked out of him by a gleefully vengeful hermaphrobot.
TETSUO is thankfully subtitled (dubbing would have ruined it), and in glorious black and white. There is a color sequel, TETSUO 2: BODY HAMMER, but reports on that one have been mixed. With it's epileptic pacing, technological subtext and unrelenting decay, it's easy to see why this one's become a favorite of the leather-clad broadband crowd.
The energy level of the film is remarkable, on a par with the most manic Chinese kung-fu horror epics. In fact, if TETSUO has any flaw at all, it's that it hits a hyperkinetic peak about half way through and spends the other half trying to sustain or top that, and can't. Still, it's one of the best and most original cult films since Videodrome, and is likely to be a party fave for some time to come. It even has a darkly humorous "happy" ending, and proves that a relationship need not be meaningful to be deep.
best,
FBC
F R A N K C O L E M A N
Member > BENTMEN
www.bentmen.com
Samurai Media Warlord > By Appointment Only
www.21ca.com