recommended

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

'This film is not for everyone' is one of those empty sentences that gets thrown around with some kind of films. But if there is a film that fits the saying, "Tetsuo" is it. Utter bonkers, making no sense whatsoever (well, a kind of flimsy one), the movie is an almost silent film with amazing imagery but close to zero story.It all starts with a guy running around after sticking a metal rod on his leg. It all continues into lots of crazy moments that seem to revolve around a salary man that little by little becomes a kind of mixture between machine and human. Like your average Kafka. But with lots of more sexual innuendo (subtlety be damned). It is all quite interesting and shocking, but, even at just a little over 60 minutes, it becomes repetitive and some (or many) viewers will end up thinking: why the heck I am caring about this?, because the film seems to be more a study on monster creation than on telling anything. And that is also taking account the more than obvious idea of man becoming machine that runs throughout "Tetsuo"'s running time.As it is, it is fascinating, but it can't overcome its shortcomings.

This nightmarish, underground Japanese black-and-white movie deserves some kind of kudos for sheer originality and kinetic pacing, but it's not an easy movie to sit through by any means. Dispensing with the usual structures of a film - narrative drive, characterisation, story - Tsukamoto instead paints a vivid and uncompromising view of a world in which metal is taking over.Along the way, the film packs in the following: stop-motion animation; maggots; graphic gore; male and female rape; and repeated scenes of stop-motion action and photography. So it's not an easy movie to watch by any means and you have to give it a real go to sit through it all. While a few of the make-up influences are clear - VIDEODROME and THE TERMINATOR to name but two - this is unlike any other movie I've watched and difficult to review. I won't say that I enjoyed it, because that would be lying and I hated many scenes, but there are some scenes of visual imagination which are quite impressive, especially with the sufficiently "epic" style ending; the metal bodysuit is inspired, the thumping music effective and I loved the nightmarish journeys which whizzed through the streets of Japan on a drug-fuelled ride.Otherwise, the acting is lousy and over-the-top and things happen so quickly that it's confusing in the extreme, especially when characters keep popping up and you have to concentrate to figure out who is who. I could also have done without some of the explicit unpleasantness that this film offers up as well. TETSUO is a must for connoisseurs of the bizarre, but the sheer speed of this film renders it almost unwatchable.

Compared to other movies I've seen which I've either strongly liked or strongly disliked, my experience with this one was pretty peculiar. I can't say that I wish I didn't see the film. I also can't say that it was a waste of time seeing this. However, I also can't see myself recommending it to my friends anytime soon or re-watching it again.After a businessman hits someone who recently inserted a rusty, metal rod into their leg, metal slowly starts to pop up on his body as he begins to mutate into a massive chunk of metal.When the film first opens up, you get a couple minutes of quiet and calm pacing showing someone walking down an alleyway. Make sure you enjoy those couple minutes while you have them because the film doesn't give you much time before it quickly turns into a non-stop, frantically paced film with realistic and gory visuals which follows those couple quiet minutes. This film is incredibly fast-paced and it doesn't have any quiet and calm moments after the opening where you can catch your breath. The film is so determined with keeping this pacing that even the credits scene doesn't give you time to relax. I actually really liked its pacing because it made it stand out from pretty much all other films I've ever seen before. It gave the horror genre a great feeling of originality.Speaking of fast-pacing, it also has grotesque visuals and effects to accelerate the film. They look realistic, and it can be a visual train wreck to see metal combine with flesh. The gore in this film is a horror movie fans dream. However, the biggest reason why I think that the visuals work so good is because of the stop motion that many parts of the film has. Considering that its shot in black and white, the stop motion gives it sort of an old, classic feeling. On top of that, seeing the stop motion in some of the scenes made me question why stop motion isn't used much more often in horror films. I feel like it works very good, and it would provide a massive feeling of originality if more films used it. Horror film directors should replace cgi with stop motion practical effects.With all that being said, this film succeeds exceptionally well on visual and technical levels. However, director Shinya Tsukamoto puts so much effort into being a perfectionist in these aspects that he doesn't leave room for anything else besides violence and gore.When I was getting to the end of the film, I kept on asking questions like "When are they going to focus on developing the characters?" and "Why is this whole film treated like its one big action packed climax?". Since character development is so minimal, I did not feel any emotional attachment to the characters, and they just seem like empty shells fighting for their lives. Its great that Tsukamoto was trying to make this film succeed visually and technically. However, as a result of doing this, he, in turn, had to sacrifice character development and depth to keep the outstanding visuals and frantic pacing.Another issue I have with it is that it can be occasionally hard to follow at times. It often jumps from one scene to another so quickly that it can be difficult to tell where the next scene starts and what is happening in it. The most confusing scene is the dream sequence. It made no hints that a dream was going on, and I had no idea that what I saw was a dream until I looked it up online after watching the film. The issue with Tsukamoto's directing is that he assumes you'll be able to figure out what's going on. There were some scenes where I was able to figure out what happened with little to no problem, there were some scenes where it took me a little while to figure out what happened, and there were some scenes like the dream sequence which were so hard to follow that I had to look up its plot in order to understand what happened. There were also a couple scenes which felt completely out of place such as the sex scenes. If your body is mutating into metal, you're not having sex with your girlfriend. You should be frantically trying to do something about it. Also, the film kept on cutting to something which looked to be a sex tape several times. I have no idea what the point of including that was, and I also had no idea what it had to do with the film.In conclusion, I had very mixed reactions to this. While many style over substance films would be dismissed as garbage, this one made its visual aspect so good that it felt like one of the more original horror films in years. Tsukamoto's directing choices helped it to be much better than what it would've been if the visual aspect had been less impressive. Unfortunately, the visual aspect was not enough to distract me from the lack of character development, and it was also a bit hard to follow at times. I feel like there were 2 ways Tsukamoto could've gone about to creating this. The 1st way was to make it like this. The 2nd way was to sacrifice the originality aspect such as the frantic pacing in order to focus more time at developing the characters. I don't know which choice I would've picked, but I can at least give the film a lot of credit for achieving near perfection in the visual aspect, even if the result was style over substance.

Sheer insanity as I've never seen before. This movie focuses entirely on the merging of the human body(..the flesh)and metal whether it be the rusted tubes used by the "fetishest" for which he inserts in his leg(after a grisly scene where he opens a long gash in his leg for the bizarre procedure) or the stainless steel razor blade which pokes from the face of "Salaryman"(Tomorowo Taguchi)before wires, a spinning crotch drill, and other objects emerge, Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo:The Iron Man" follows a very surreal nightmarish scenario to a really crazy conclusion. Tsukamoto is a man with a fixation for implanting metal in his body and in a crazed moment of madness(after seeing maggots all over the rusty tube he inserted)runs out in the street, getting hit by a man in glasses, tie, and white shirt(an obvious white collar worker of some sort). This man(the film dubs as "Salaryman")and his girlfriend(Kei Fujiwara)decide to discard the guy down some hill to get rid of him(..and, after act, the couple get so hot and bothered by their misdeed, the two have sex as we watch them through metal fetishist's point-of-view), awakening a monster. You see the "metal fetishist" will get revenge by causing Salaryman to evolve into some sort of human junk heap. Gradually wires and other metallic odds and ends burst from within Salaryman and the missus obviously doesn't respond well to his dilemma. After an attempt to kill him with a steak knife, the drill pops up to burrow through her, splashing blood all over the place. We also watch as metal fetishist toys with Salaryman by sending him down streets at warp speed, causing the fella to evolve faster than he'd like, and eventually deciding to transform him totally and completely into a metal trash pile. I think Cronenberg is especially noted as an influence in "Tetsuo" because of the eventual metamorphosis of man and metal, the creation of an entire new species, as metal fetishist and Salaryman "cohesively bond" at the end, ultimately deciding they will share their "union" with the world around them. I've never seen a movie quite like "Tetsuo", with the black and white photography, shot as if lensed by a madman, actually enhancing the hysteria in a way I can not describe. Tsukamoto uses incredible camera speeds with characters moving down streets at a blistering pace. But, what I was overwhelmed and exhilarated by was the stop motion effects where we see how metal fetishist and Salaryman slowly metamorphose into metal creatures...the way wires take on a life of their own. The movie is certainly an experience unlike any other, hard to define, and absolutely psychotic. It was probably for the best that "Tetsuo:The Iron Man" was only 60+ minutes long, because it is such a shock to the senses, so nutty that it could easily overstay it's welcome.