Tetsuo: The Iron Man was the single greatest movie I saw for last year's Halloween Festivities. If you haven't seen that movie, you NEED to. Right now. Even if you ignore these posts entirely and aren't reading this, you need to watch Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It is most of the most amazing movies ever made. Filthy 8MM, low-budget, black and white nightmares and body horror. Imagine David Cronenberg and David Lynch mated with a rusting scrapyard and had a baby together. That's the movie you'd get. It's awesome!
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer claims to be a sequel. There is a number in the title. It is also about a mild-manner salary man guy played by Taniguchi Tomoo transforming painfully into a metal monster abomination. Both movies feature Shin'ya Tsukamoto as a crazy bad guy with a fetish for metal out to torture the hero. However, plot-wise, I don't think these two stories have anything to do with each other. These are not exactly the easiest movies to comprehend anyway. You can debate if Tetsuo 1 even has a plot. Tetsuo II doesn't have an ending. And I'm still not clear who or what Tetsuo is.
Tetsuo II has a more coherent story, for better or worse. This is much more of an action movie, even if a particularly gonzo one. Tomoo (the character has the same name as the actor) is a meek little man in Tokyo with a son and a wife. His son is kidnapped by a couple of big dudes in Matrix costumes. Tomoo runs after them and is nearly killed, but then gains the power to grow out of his body big-ass twisted metal cannons. This goes very badly for Tomoo and his family very quickly. I won't spoil what happens. But Tetsuo II has a very dark sense of humor. And holy fuck, I was not expecting that.
From there, Tomoo goes for revenge against an evil cult of bald fascists led by Yatsu (Shin'ya Tsukamoto). They are all body builders in the normal sense. But also body builders in the wacky Tetsuo way because they're trying out formulas that turn their arms into metal cannons. Only Tomoo gets the full power though. He slowly becomes something like an Abrams Tank that walks like a man.
I also cannot not talk about a graphic sex scene involving a loaded pistol. I can't say I would be comfortable with partner doing that. This does not top the sex scene from Tetsuo I, however, where the nameless hero fucks his girlfriend with a giant drill boner. Tetsuo I fucking rules.
And that leads me to my problem with this movie. Tetsuo II is not as extreme as the first and so not as good. It doesn't focus as much on the transformation or the horror. There's a bigger budget but not better effects or much better visuals. Like we have color now, but the only color you see through most of this movie is blue. You see red too, of course, for all the blood. Tetsuo II just lacks that wonderful grungy feeling of the original. It has some of it with the anarchic editing and bizarre story decisions. But that first movie really felt like you were rolling around in a pile of metal garage. You'd need a tetanus shot after Tetsuo I.
I still recommend both movies heavily. There is just not much out there with this level of insane punk filmmaking. Still, the original is one of the greatest things I've ever seen and Tetsuo II is just an okay sequel. I want to talk about the original more.
Next Time: Not Tetsuo III. Saving that for 2021's Halloween. Instead lets do Scre4m (2011), or as I call it, "Scre-four-um".
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