Been on a bit of a Shinya Tsukamoto marathon...
Tetsuo: The Iron man
The plot, such as it is, has a salaryman and his missus running over a 'metal fetishist' played by Shinya Tsukamoto himself. The pair decide to hide the body but the salaryman soon finds himself transforming into a metal man.
The narrative may be a bit thin but its all there to serve what can only really be described as an Audio visual experience. Shot in harsh black & white with a pounding industrial soundtrack Tsukamoto deploys all the tricks at his disposal including stop motion photography, frenetic camera work and rapid editing and bizarre imagery, including the lead actors cock turning into a drill, all to assault the audience in one of the wildest and weirdest cyberpunk films ever made.
Tetsuo: The body hammer.
Not so much a sequel as a reworking of the original, Tsukamoto delivers more of a narrative here as a mild mannered salaryman is attacked by a strange cult-like group. This triggers a transformation in him that causes him to mutate into an iron man. After his son dies the seemingly mild-mannered man goes after the cult.
Here Tsukamoto switches out stark, grimy black & white for gorgeous orange pallets. He shoots images of bodybuilders with an almost fetishistic attention to detail. He contrasts this with the strange metallic transformations of the iron man to look at the ways the human body can be transformed both artifically and naturally.
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