Grade:        B

Moral:        Man-tank is angry!

Blame it on Jungian synchronicity that I would end up rewatching Tetsuo: The Iron Man within a day of seeing Iron Man. The two are kind of not really in a way sort of not at all strangely closely similar, in that at their cores they’re about men fusing with the metals of their own fabricated world, yet they’re so wholly different that, if they were touch, it’d probably cause an anti-matter explosion that would destroy the universe. Credit low-budget and / or Japanese punk-cinema ingenuity that this one’s a helluva lot more intense (if, also, much more grating on the senses), though blame the same that it’s efficacy goes hand-in-hand with its willingness to be deafening.

Were this written after the first time I watched it, I’d be ululating its praises; the second time through, though, it comes off exactly like most everything else Shinya Tsukamoto has done: it’s a work of stark genius offset by a guy who just doesn’t know how to sniff out the cheesy. In retrospect, in discussion, in description, Tetsuo is just about the most fucking awesome thing in existence, but, at the time, it just comes off as Eraserhead as done by a young Sogo Ishii and marinated in Cronenberg’s juices. Yet we already falling into its trap: it’s not actually as mind-blowing as that sounds.

A reality check before we criticize too much: this is a z-budget film made in a then small film industry by a first-time filmmaker, and we’re still talking about it two decades later, and it still kicks a fair share of ass. At its best it leaps from the screen like a silent-film nightmare from Planet Metallurgy, and, as a friend noted, its visions of iron rapes and rusting apocalypses are just about the best approximation in existence of living in Tokyo (joking, but truly Tsukamoto’s best asset has always been his ability to condense the post-futuristic horror of that megalopolis into glistening, cinematic evocations). A standout movie to be sure and a landmark one for the no-budget scene, Tetsuo is moreover a great litmus test for your friends. If they make it past the drill-penis, then give them a cookie. If they make it all the way through and still talk to you afterwards, then they’re a keeper.