• 鉄男 (Tetsuo, The Iron Man)

10/19/24 (Fri)

Tsukamoto Shinya’s (Shadow of Fire) surrealistic 1989 horror fantasy about… actually, I’m not sure what it’s about, but it involves a man, a woman and a male hit-and-run victim who gradually turn into machines. I think. There’s no real story here, just a bare narrative on which the director can hang some bad visuals. Some of the effects are undeniably shocking, starting with the very beginning when a man inserts a metal bar painfully into his leg in some sort of bionic-man fantasy. The maggots and spurting blood were truly stomach-churning, so that’s some sort of achievement. The rest was a wild mixture of demented scenes, like the man who finds a metal bolt sticking out of his face when he’s shaving, or a woman with an arm of mangled steel chasing the terrified man in the bowels of Tokyo. Actually Tokyo was all bowels here with little of the usual Blade Runner type images of a futuristic city, which I suppose was innovative in its own way. There was some notable homoerotic fantasy, like the woman who jams the tubular projection from her body up a man’s butt or the man whose penis becomes a huge whirling screw (classic line: “You want a taste of my sewage pipe?”). According to some reviewers, the joining of the two men into one gigantic robot at the end (“We can mutate the whole world into metal…Our love can destroy this whole f**king world!”), was a homoerotic scene as well. There’s also a woman who lasciviously licks a sausage as well as the man’s metal pipe. Whatever turns her on.

That’s all mixed with a constant flow of steel, machine parts, and writhing bodies, as well as some B-movie Godzilla-reject costumes depicting the people turning into metal. I didn’t get it at all; some enlightening reviews that help make some sense of it are actually more entertaining than the movie. Its short running time of 67 minutes was the sole saving grace. It boasts some stunning images, a metallic score that fits the proceedings, and a propulsive, exhausting energy that never flags. Tetsuo, the full Japanese title, is a fairly common male name that literally means “iron man”. I assume the director is saying something about the dehumanization of society or such; I suppose I’d need to see it again to piece it all together. But that’s not going to happen.