Iron Man Week: Tetsuo the Iron Man

Shinya Tsukamoto's original Testsuo film is frantic, brutal, weird, and kind of amazing.  Japan produces a ton of low-budget splatter movies but Tetsuo's grainy black and white cinematography and pounding industrial score help it to stand out from the pack.  The term "Cyberpunk" gets applied to so many things that it seems almost toothless, but Tetsuo the Iron Man is truly deserving of the description.  It's full of raw aggression, bursts of violence, and a fearful view of technology as some kind of demonizing virus.  This is probably another movie that has been ruined for new audiences by YouTube clips because sitting down to watch all 67 minutes of it is a completely different experience than just seeing a two minute clip of Tetsuo turning into a bloody machine.

Testsuo spawned an equally disturbing but not nearly as frenetic sequel (Tetsuo II: Body Hammer) and there's a third film on the way this year.  Tsukamoto's films can be hard to watch--the violence is almost comically over-the-top, but it's also brutal and disturbing and he plays a lot with the theme of masculinity.  The movies tend to ride the razor edge of being completely misogynistic but I don't think the violence is supposed to be a positive thing.  Honestly though, with a lot of these movies, it's hard to tell.  Though it's very far away from Marvel's Iron Man, it does go into territory explored in the Iron Man comics, so Tetsuo seems like a fitting end to Iron Man week.