Today's Topics:
TETSUO (movie review/spoiler)
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Date: Thu, 23 Sep 93 10:22:57 EDT
From: Mark_Colan.LOTUS@crd.lotus.com
Message-Id: <9309231422.AA09277@Mail.Lotus.com>
To: UNIXML: ;, lotus.com@crd.lotus.com
Subject: TETSUO (movie review/spoiler)
Forwarded by permission of author. --mtc
From: UNIXML::"frank_coleman@alewife.kodak.com" @ LOTUSVAX
Date: 09/22/93 12:30:29 PM
Subject: TETSUO (movie review: has spoiler)
This will be in the next issue of Boston Rock. Submitted FYE (For Yr Enjoyment)
FBC
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TETSUO
Film Review by Frank Coleman
TETSUO (Fox/Lorber) is a tender love story between an androgynous
metamorphosing bionic demon and a man with a three-foot-long rotating iron
penis. Sort of.
It's kind of hard to say what TETSUO (translation: IRON MAN) is "about,"
actually. Roles, personae, points-of-view, sexual identities and both human and
technical infrastructure are not so much reversed as all smooshed together in
this bleak and disturbing vision. It appears that multiple actors play the same
part, but even that's not certain, nor does it really matter. Director Shinya
Tsukamoto has given us this, one of the "Regular-size Monster Series" the
credits claim, as a sort of all-purpose allegory for the fall of just about
everything,. The film is a symphonic tone poem of wires, soot, blood, latex,
metal, speed and rust. But the greatest of these is rust. In this warped world,
not only do people mutate, the by-product of the mutation falls apart as well.
Since the film is a wild cyclone of outrageous images and situations, it seems
pointless to try to sequentially describe the "plot." Instead, here are some of
the impressions, the resonances left behind:
A well-dressed Japanese dead ringer for David Byrne suddenly erupts into fits
of spasmodic thrashing while his clothing rebels as if there were wild ferrets
running around under his shirt. Later, a prim lady seated uncomfortably next to
him in a train station spies a twisted hunk of metal, which happens to contain
a hidden camera, lying on the floor. Curious, she reaches down to poke it with
her pen and is suddenly transformed into an evil hell spawn with a mess of
twisted resistors for a hand. She chases him down into the bowels of the
station. One punch and it's out the door, up the stairs, out into the street
and across town in hi-speed time-lapse to an anonymous garage in suburbia.
She's right behind him. He's helpless, naked, on all fours on the floor. She
does her kinky little dance, a six-foot-long cobra-like metallic snake/dick
coiling out from her crotch towards him. She implants him, upgrades him if you
will, rectally. There's a lot of screaming in this movie.
The guy stumbles through the trashy rubble after getting the roto-rooter
treatment, howling in agony. "Ow...Ouch," say the subtitles. His girlfriend
shrieks in horror at his newfound appendage, which he discovers one morning
upon drilling a hole through the underside of the kitchen table while being
aroused by her at breakfast. The rest of his body quickly erupts into a
electronic mess of skin and plugs. He hides in the bathroom. One word of
advise, friends, never try to pop a metal zit. She begs to be let in. "You're
not going to like this," he says. More screams as she mashes the bottom of a
hot frying pan into what's left of his face.
She sticks a knife in his throat and he collapses to the floor, his spinning
willie finally stilled. She starts licking his face. He's not dead, though,
only dreaming of a long-ago tryst with her in the woods. It's implied that this
is a mutual hallucination. He awakens to find her lust for him has proven
fatally irresistible. She has sat on him anyway. Unfortunately, his reverie
having jump-started him, the wall behind her is now covered in bloody spray,
lending new meaning to the term, "screw." She falls face first to the floor
with a thud, and a black puddle leaks out of her mouth. He tenderly places her
corpse in the bathtub, festooned with garlands.
A man in the TV set has been watching all this. "You've got a piece of metal
stuck in your brain," he says. "Let's say it's artistically stuck there...think
of it as an ornament." There is one hellacious fight scene after another, as
Tetsuo tries to figure out why he's a) turning rapidly into a modern art
sculpture and b) getting the crap kicked out of him by a gleefully vengeful
hermaphrobot.
The Fox/Lorber domestic release is coupled with an American short film,
"Drumstruck," a grimly funny little parable about a drummer auditioning for a
band and running into trouble with one of his competitors. It has a nice
Jarmusch-like noir feel to it, and features the perfect revenge every drummer
ever felt in a similar situation.
TETSUO is thankfully subtitled (dubbing would have ruined it), and in glorious
black and white. There is a color sequel, TETSUO 2: BODY HAMMER, available as
an import from Video Search of Miami (305-279-9773). With it's epileptic
pacing, technological subtext and unrelenting decay, it's easy to see why this
one's become a favorite of the leather-clad-modem crowd.
The energy level of the film is remarkable, on a par with the most manic
Chinese kung-fu horror epics. In fact, if TETSUO has any flaw at all, it's
that it hits a hyperkinetic peak about half way through and spends the other
half trying to sustain or top that, and can't. Still, it's one of the best and
most original cult films since Videodrome, and is likely to be a party fave for
some time to come. It even has a darkly humorous "happy" ending, and proves
that a relationship need not be meaningful to be deep.
- Frank Coleman
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End of Subgenius Digest
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