tenshi_ippikiookami 'This film is not for everyone' is one of those empty sentences that gets thrown around with some kind of films. But if there is a film that fits the saying, "Tetsuo" is it. Utter bonkers, making no sense whatsoever (well, a kind of flimsy one), the movie is an almost silent film with amazing imagery but close to zero story.It all starts with a guy running around after sticking a metal rod on his leg. It all continues into lots of crazy moments that seem to revolve around a salary man that little by little becomes a kind of mixture between machine and human. Like your average Kafka. But with lots of more sexual innuendo (subtlety be damned). It is all quite interesting and shocking, but, even at just a little over 60 minutes, it becomes repetitive and some (or many) viewers will end up thinking: why the heck I am caring about this?, because the film seems to be more a study on monster creation than on telling anything. And that is also taking account the more than obvious idea of man becoming machine that runs throughout "Tetsuo"'s running time.As it is, it is fascinating, but it can't overcome its shortcomings.

Leofwine_draca This nightmarish, underground Japanese black-and-white movie deserves some kind of kudos for sheer originality and kinetic pacing, but it's not an easy movie to sit through by any means. Dispensing with the usual structures of a film - narrative drive, characterisation, story - Tsukamoto instead paints a vivid and uncompromising view of a world in which metal is taking over.Along the way, the film packs in the following: stop-motion animation; maggots; graphic gore; male and female rape; and repeated scenes of stop-motion action and photography. So it's not an easy movie to watch by any means and you have to give it a real go to sit through it all. While a few of the make-up influences are clear - VIDEODROME and THE TERMINATOR to name but two - this is unlike any other movie I've watched and difficult to review. I won't say that I enjoyed it, because that would be lying and I hated many scenes, but there are some scenes of visual imagination which are quite impressive, especially with the sufficiently "epic" style ending; the metal bodysuit is inspired, the thumping music effective and I loved the nightmarish journeys which whizzed through the streets of Japan on a drug-fuelled ride.Otherwise, the acting is lousy and over-the-top and things happen so quickly that it's confusing in the extreme, especially when characters keep popping up and you have to concentrate to figure out who is who. I could also have done without some of the explicit unpleasantness that this film offers up as well. TETSUO is a must for connoisseurs of the bizarre, but the sheer speed of this film renders it almost unwatchable.

gavin6942 A strange man known only as the "metal fetishist", who seems to have an insane compulsion to stick scrap metal into his body, is hit and possibly killed by a Japanese "salaryman", out for a drive with his girlfriend.The film draws inspiration from the 1988 film "Akira". Although not exactly clear, it seems like something between David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and some of the stranger films of the 1990s. The imagery and music strongly evoke industrial music culture, which at this point was really in its infancy, not breaking for a few years. This film seems to have been an influence on Trent Reznor for such videos as "Happiness in Slavery", though it may be coincidental.I am a bit surprised to see I was not familiar with any of Shinya Tsukamoto's work, including this film, despite my deep passion for horror and science fiction. I am quite familiar with the films of Takashi Miike, who is clearly a pupil of Tsukamoto.

Paul Celano (chelano) What can I really about this film besides it makes me feel very uncomfortable. You can tell this film had no real budget for special effects. Just make up and tricks they used to make things look; gross. But it worked. I think this movie wouldn't of been that interesting if it wasn't for that. The story itself is very demented and very confusing, but it seems to come together by the end. The cast just did a great job of being so strange and usual. Tomorowo Taguchi plays the iron man and he was just over all fantastic. He rival is played by Nobu Kanaoka. He did just fine, but wasn't as high of standard as Tomorowo. The only other person who sticks out is Kei Fujiwara so can really move her body around. There are many scenes in the film that will leave you cringing at the site of them, but that is what makes this movie great. It I have one complaint it would have to be that the film was pretty confusing. So confusing at points that the movie seemed a lot longer than it was. Other than that, it was strangely amazing.