director: shinya tsukamoto

cast: tomorowo taguchi, nobu kanaoka, min tanaka, keinosuke tomioka, sujin kim, hideaki tezuka, tomoo asada, torauemon utazawa, shinya tsukamoto

"As the city grows bigger, it seems that people re-evolve, lose touch with their bodies, become disembodied almost, live only through their brains."—Director, Shinya Tsukamoto

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (aka Beauty in Destruction) is the follow-up of Shinya Tsukamoto's 1988 Tetsuo: Ironman, and isn't so much a sequel as a redo with a bigger budget and more plot. The original was in grainy black & white and involved the transformation of a man into a machine, induced by a mysterious accident. Most often the two films are compared to David Lynch or David Cronenberg movies—imagine Eraserhead meets Videodrome. Perhaps a better description is to say it's a modernized Frankenstein fable (like Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop) that is seen through the filter of Japanese culture. In this case there is no Dr. Frankenstein, no single person to blame for the genesis of a monster. It is technology unleashing a transformed humanity capable of mass destruction. In Tetsuo II, the monster is simply a product of the modern, industrialized world. In this view, the transformation of man into machine is a natural outcome of humanity living in an unnatural, mechanical environment. Manga or Anime fans have said that Tetsuo is only a live action version of the genre, but that's like saying a live action version of Bambi wouldn't be fundamentally different from the animated one. Form not only follows, but affects content, and the reaction it provokes. A novel's treatment of the Lincoln assassination is very different from a poem about the same event. Live action, even when it's sometimes animated, has a "reality" that traditional animation does not.

Tetsuo II's plot is centered on a milquetoast-nancy named Tomoo (Tomoroh Taguchi) and his downward spiral into mechanized insanity. Tomoo is a wimpy businessman with a wife and son. He wears thick rimmed "Buddy Holly glasses", and a strong breeze could probably knock him over. His wife, Kana (Nobu Kanaoka), is the more powerful of the two, both physically and emotionally. The quick portrait that's sketched of this family could be described as "Japanese Gothic". There's something austere, mysterious, and seriously off-kilter in its makeup. At this point things get really weird. While shopping in a mall, the family is attacked by a couple of techno-cyber punks. Their little son is kidnapped and a chase ensues that finishes on a skyscraper's roof. After a struggle, Tomoo and Kana recover their child. It's not that Tomoo and Kana win the battle so much as the techno-cyber punks let them have their kid back. The purpose of this confrontation is to trigger Tomoo's transformation from scrawny wimp into metallic doomsday machine. This encounter reawakens the rage that has been slumbering within him. As we later learn, Tomoo's unremembered past isn't a peaceful one. The techno-cyber punks soon reappear and snatch the boy from the couple's home. During this second attack, Tomoo begins his physical transformation into a cyborg killing machine. His hands become mini-cannons, and his muscles start to be replaced by wires and tubes. The kidnapper holds the child up as a shield. In an uncontrollable rage Tomoo fires his hand-canons, killing his son.

There is no return from insanity for Tomoo after the death of his son. The eerie and disturbing imagery quickly multiplies. Phallic pipes erupt from his torso and chunky blocks of armor replace his body until Tomoo looks like a diesel fueled Gumby-from-hell. He even incorporates the techno-cyber punk gang into his growing, mechanical body. Many of these sequences are animated, using the actor and bits of scrap metal. Sometimes we see Tomoo in time-lapse photography, standing still as the people of the city flow around him. Another technique used is under-cranking the camera and cross-dissolving the images, which results in a nice trippy effect. Unlike the original Tetsuo, Tetsuo II is in color, but the color is often just muted grays and blues. A few sequences involve a blast furnace that exists somewhere in the techno-cyber punk's lair. These scenes are glowing orange, like they exist in the pit of hell. Forget the plot. The visuals tell the story here. There is no CGI gimmickry, but Tetsuo looks like few other films you have ever seen. The Lynch/Cronenberg analogy breaks down. The lesser known work of Czechoslovakian animator Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Faust) is more apt. Both Tetsuo films are unique and stand on their own. They were made over a decade ago, but Shinya Tsukamoto's films have retained their power to transport you to the bizarro-world, if you don't mind the trip. Tetsuo II is for those who want something different… very different.

One last point—I have to bring up the issue of sadism and sex in Far East movies. If you've ever seen In the Realm of the Senses then you know what I'm talking about. In the Realm of the Senses is an extreme example but there's a little bit of that movie in many other Japanese films that aren't specifically about power and sex. In Senses, an obsessed couple engages in more and more twisted acts until the stomach-churning castration scene at the end. In Tetsuo II, a young Tomoo and his little brother witness their parent's involvement in some very weird behavior. Their creepy father uses a cocked gun to heighten the sexual experience. It's not clear if their mother is a willing participant in this bizarre and incredibly dangerous game. At one point, their father pushes the barrel of the gun into her mouth. Your skin will crawl as her teeth makes a scraping sound against the gun's barrel while they hump. I don't have enough knowledge of Japanese culture to pretend to give insight into the underpinnings of these recurrent and disturbing images of sexual abuse. They obviously betray male anxiety over the independence of women and the desire to control them, by no means a specifically Japanese phenomenon. Other reviewers tend to ignore these elements in their treatment of Japanese, and to a lesser degree, Hong Kong cinema, but I can't imagine this happening if the same shit cropped up in an American film. One fairly recent American movie (by a Canadian) did push into this territory and that was Crash, which was directed by, surprise-surprise, David Cronenberg. However, Crash was sexually bizarre but not sadistic (masochistic really). That didn't stop New Line Cinema from running in terror from its role as the promoter of Crash. There is a place in movies for these ideas to be discussed but the point I'm trying to make is that often they aren't. In the case of Crash, most reviewers tended to simply express their outrage and call on the reader to avoid the offending movie. I'm going the other way: Check out Tetsuo: Ironman & Bodyhammer… or Crash! What does it all mean? Let me know when you figure it out.— Tom Graney