Horrorfest 2022: Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Written and directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Starring Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara and Shinya Tsukamoto
Japan, 1989

This one’s been a long time coming and I’m kind of glad I finally got it over with. TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is the kind of endurance test of a movie that film buffs toss around as some kind of proving ground, like if you’ve seen (let alone liked it) you’ve passed some kind of test. This is the kind of movie where, if it had hit my radar when I was 14 or 15 I might to this day tell people how cool it is. Instead, I just kept hearing about it for decades and now I’m an old man who’s here to tell you it sucks.

But, you sort of have to admire it. Clearly a lot of work went into it on the part of the cast and crew, and a lot was done with few resources. I’m not sure I can quite explain what this movie’s about, except to say that it seems to be about a man who increasingly starts growing metal parts out of his body until his more metal than man. This description doesn’t really do it justice, though. Try to picture an early David Lynch movie combined with David Cronenberg’s fascination with body horror and Sam Raimi’s hyperactive, kinetic shot composition and editing. 

Writer/director/star Shinha Tsukamoto has at least done one thing that is critical for a good horror movie, which is to hit on some kind of primal fear or disgust or uncomfortableness. The notion of metal parts growing out of skin, or scraping against each other, all that stuff is squirm-inducing. So, he hit on that, but then kinda doesn’t know what to do with it. Actually, that’s not true – I’m sure this is probably exactly the film Tsukamoto wanted to make. Just not sure why. 

But then again, why not, right? 

Watching this film I got “first movie” vibes. I thought, okay, so, this experimental bout of insanity was this guy’s first shot and after this he went on to something bigger and better that I’ll recognize the title of. So, I was surprised to find out this film is squarely in the middle of Tsukamoto’s filmography, and didn’t lead to anything bigger or better (unless you count sequels).