This is third year of these Spooky Season daily reviews. Thus, we must return to Shinya Tsukamoto's groundbreaking horror franchise, Tetsuo. Tetsuo: The Iron Man blew my fucking mind two years ago. That is still the greatest movie by far I’ve discovered doing these reviews. That 1989 first movie was a filthy, gonzo, utterly deranged, utterly disgusting masterpiece of heavy metal poisoning. I was very excited to see Tetsuo II: Body Hammer last year, though unsurprisingly, it was less memorable. Still unrelentingly strange and unique, but far less great. So how does Tetsuo: The Bullet Man finish up the trilogy?
Well, it finished the series poorly, I’m sorry to say. This is a still a thrilling ride of shaky-cam and body horror. However, Tetsuo: The Bullet Man is the worst movie of the three by far. One can tell immediately that Tetsuo III was not the movie Tsukamoto wanted to make.
The Tetsuo trilogy is not really connected in narrative. They're more different versions of the same kind of story made over the course of twenty years. There’s always a bland vanilla salary
man whose life is overthrown by the outrageous kinks of metal horror. There’s always a creepy
monster obsessed with his body fetishes (played by Shinya Tsukamoto).
Tetsuo II and III both involve a family being destroyed, with the plot launching when is a little boy is murdered by the nameless Iron Fetishist. The salaryman
then transforms into something else, a being of pure rage whose body that is
a living weapon. He finally does battle with the Fetishist. The endings rarely are more lucid than the rest of the story.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man's version of the story is about Anthony
(Eric Bossick) our latest salaryman, whose son, Tom (Tiger Charlie Gerhardt) is slaughtered on purpose for seemingly after being hit by a car. Anthony cannot deal with thoughts of revenge, while his wife,
Yuriko (Akiko Monô), begs and screams for blood. Eventually Anthony is consumed by emotion and is subsumed into a bodily prison of metal and guns. He then
discovers that his father, Ride (Stephen Sarrazin) fucked a female android, and that’s why their bloodline is cursed to turn into monsters. Then
Anthony is tempted to destroy the Fetishist (Tsukamoto, as always). The narrative gets a little unclear at this point, but apparently if Anthony fires his ultimate laser cannon, all of Tokyo will be destroyed.
There was a seventeen-year gap between Body Hammer and The Bullet Man, which tells me that not everything went according to plan. After the first two Tetsuos made a huge splash in the early Nineties indie film scene, Tsukamoto got global attention as a hot director. According to interviews I found form 2009, Tsukamoto then spent much of a decade trying to make a “Tetsuo America” set in the US with an English-speaking cast. Quentin Tarantino was involved at one point and there were rumors of Tim Roth starring. As happens frequently, bad luck killed that project. The timing was never right, Tsukamoto was uncomfortable working with Hollywood, and of course, 9/11 changed everything. So, The Bullet Man is instead an independent Japanese production, shot in Tokyo. But perhaps as sour grapes for the Tetsuo America that never happened, Tsukamoto made the movie in English.
English is one of the biggest problems with Tetsuo: The Bullet
Man. Tsukamoto is not fluent in English and neither are most of the
actors. They all do a solid job speaking the language, by which I mean, you can
understand what they’re saying. However, nobody knows how to perform as an actor in
this language. The star, Eric Bossick, is one of the few native speakers of English. Still his
performance is, well, bizarre. The acting in Tetsuo III reminds me a lot of early
voice-acting in video games. The deliveries are similar to Resident Evil on the PS1. It
is stilted and unnatural, English-speaking people just do not talk this way.
That alienation can be a plus when we’re talking about the Tetsuo
series. These are, after all, movies that feel like they were made by digging
around a landfill and swimming in the trash. The plotlines are usually only
vaguely coherent. (Three movies deep and I still do not know who Tetsuo is.)
They’re tone pieces of pure Id, with furious camera shakes and fast cuts so frenetic that you lose track of what is happening. It sadly does not work in Tetsuo III, which has the least body horror of any of these movies. We
only have a fraction of the grungy and tetanus-infected vibes of that wonderful first
movie.
The Bullet Man is shot on digital cameras, so the film stock looks
too clean. At least there is either very little or no CG, which would have looked worse. But where is the
filth? Where is the perverted sexual horror of a man growing a drill penis and
fucking a woman to death? It’s barely here. Tetsuo III is barely eighty minutes
and the moment you think this movie is finally about to lose control, it just ends.
I think what Tsukamoto wanted was a more traditional three
act structure. He calls this movie a "rational Tetsuo". There is the skeleton in The
Bullet Man of some movie he was trying to sell as a more mainstream film. That’s why the entire thing is less extreme, why it is in English. However, that’s a compromise that gets us nowhere. Tetsuo:
The Bullet Man had no hope of ever being any other than a super niche curiosity
here in the West (or anywhere really). So why not commit to the gonzo?
Who wanted this Tetsuo for grandmas? I want the irrational Tetsuo, the transcendental Tetsuo, the uncountable infinity Tetsuo, the Tetsuo of the complex plain and beyond! The Bullet Man is not it. It isn't for anybody. But at least I have a movie for me, and that is the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Nothing will ever take that magical experience away.
Next time we travel to 2010, the year of a massive oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, a massive spill of severe disappointment with Final Fantasy XIII, and our next movie, Black Swan.
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