I’m a big fan of director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Japanese splatterpunk body horror classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Don’t ask why it took me so long to check this sequel out. It’s flat-out nuts.
Two men try to abduct a man’s son in broad daylight. While he’s trying to get his child back, they shoot him with a strange bullet. He soon finds that whenever he gets angry or is under extreme duress, his body twists into metallic forms. When he is kidnapped by the mysterious underground faction, they hook him up to a giant headset which intensifies his powers and he turns into a gnarly, malformed cyborg hellbent on revenge.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man was a low budget marvel that was sort of like a cyberpunk version of Eraserhead. This time out, the inspiration seems to be American action movies, namely Terminator 2. Whole scenes seem to copy that film (as well as C + C Music Factory’s music videos), but with a body horror edge. Imagine if David Cronenberg was at the helm of T2 instead of James Cameron and that may give you an idea of what to expect. (There are also nods to The Fly, Videodrome, and Aliens.) The action sequences are pretty wild for the budget and some of the transformation scenes are downright insane.
This is the part of the review where I admit the version I saw didn’t have subtitles. That just enriched the overall lunacy of it all. I didn’t need to follow the plot. The images did all the heavy lifting for me. I mean who needs plot when whole chunks of the movie are devoted to a large machine gun turret erupting out of your hero’s chest? By the time the final act rolls around and your main character has morphed into what can only be described as Robo-Gumby, you just have to be in awe at the ingenious zaniness of it all.
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