Only four days left until Halloween Month will be over for another year. Here’s a review I first posted in 2013.
TETSUO THE IRON MAN (1989) – Director Shinya Tsukamoto hails from Japan and is noted for his surreal, nightmarish excursions into the darker side of transformative industrial technology … especially any technology that impacts the human anatomy. Long time readers of Balladeer’s Blog may recall that I cite this black & white film as one of my favorite sci-fi horrors ever.
From the early shots of a man agonizingly removing one of his own bones and replacing it with a piece of metal, viewers knew this was a dark work of true genius. Tetsuo continues to become more and more relevant by the year, especially regarding nanotechnology and its potentially invasive effect on the human mind and body.
I’ll give my courtesy WARNING that readers who don’t like extreme concepts may not want to click on “Continue reading.”
Our title character continues experimenting on his own body to satisfy his metal fetish despite all the pain of the self-surgeries he performs and the troubling infections he suffers from. Tetsuo’s commitment to transforming himself into a monster doesn’t flag.
Eventually he reaches the point of no return, and his body begins mutating beyond anything he first imagined and the process becomes unstoppable. The transhumanism concepts that Tetsuo the Iron Man plays with have been imitated in many other horror flicks since 1989 but Tsukamoto blazed the trail.
Prepare yourself for body horror beyond anything David Cronenberg ever brought to the big screen. The anatomies of the film’s characters become distorted and morph into metal figures that challenge preconceived notions of beauty, ugliness, evolution and even what constitutes life. Death itself is no obstacle for Tetsuo and the others since “repairs” of a sort can restore functionality.
The movie’s nightmarish monstrosities become like their own separate species with a lifecycle as grotesque as the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise. The black & white cinematography keeps the extreme horror seeming more artistic than gratuitous, even when it comes to a macabre mating scene.
Shinya Tsukamoto first dabbled in the aesthetics of Tetsuo the Iron Man with his 1986 short film A Regular-Sized Monster (Kaijin). That 18-minute production is sort of like Within the Woods is to the original Evil Dead.
Tsukamoto followed up with Tetsuo II: Body Hammer in 1992 and Tetsuo the Bullet Man in 2009. In my opinion, neither sequel lived up to the freshness and trailblazing nature of the original.
Tetsuo the Iron Man features transcendent images that are horrific yet hypnotic and remain with you forever after.
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