Tetsuo: The Iron Man
| Tetsuo: The Iron Man | |
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Original newspaper advertisement
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| Directed by | Shinya Tsukamoto |
| Produced by | Shinya Tsukamoto |
| Written by | Shinya Tsukamoto |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Chu Ishikawa |
| Cinematography |
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| Edited by | Shinya Tsukamoto |
| Distributed by | Kaijyu Theatres |
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Release date
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Running time
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64 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (鉄男: Tetsuo) is a 1989 Japanese cyberpunk horror film written, produced, edited, and directed by cult-film director Shinya Tsukamoto, and produced by Japan Home Video. It is shot in the same low-budget, underground-production style as his first two films. Tetsuo established Tsukamoto internationally and created his worldwide cult following. It was followed by Body Hammer (1992) and The Bullet Man (2009).
The film opens with a man (called only "the man" (Yatsu) in the credits, or the "Metal Fetishist" in English-language film criticism), cutting open a massive gash in his leg and then shoving a large threaded steel rod into the wound. Later, upon seeing maggots festering in the wound, he screams, runs out into the street, and is hit by a car. The driver of the car, a Japanese salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi), and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) try to cover up the mess by dumping the body into a ravine, but the dumped man gets revenge by forcing the salaryman's body to gradually metamorphose into a walking pile of scrap metal. This process starts when the salaryman finds a piece of metal stuck in his cheek while shaving. He tries to remove it, but realizes it is growing from the inside.
The scene cuts to the salaryman at his home having breakfast, with a bandage over his cheek. He receives a phone call, consisting of nothing but him and the other speaker (possibly his girlfriend) continuously saying "Hello?" to each other and flashing back to having sex after dumping the Metal Fetishist.
The first of several highly stylized chase scenes starts with the salaryman pursued through an underground train station by a woman whose body has been taken over by the Metal Fetishist as he is on his way to work. The salaryman seems to win this encounter by breaking the back of the radically transformed woman (she begins the sequence as a demure office worker and ends it as a wild metal-infected woman) after even more metal has erupted on his ankles and arm.
The next segment is a terrifying dream sequence where the salaryman's girlfriend, transformed into an exotic dancer with a snake-like metal probe, terrorizes and rapes the salaryman. After waking from this dream, the salaryman and his girlfriend have sex at his apartment and eat erotically. As she eats each bite given to her, he hears the sounds of metal scraping. The salaryman suddenly discovers his penis has mutated into a gargantuan power drill. A fight ensues where the salaryman terrorizes his girlfriend, and acquires more and more metal on his body. She fights back and in the end impales herself on his drill and dies.
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