Tetsuo: The Iron Man Review
Most horror movies, which you can find nearly anywhere, are easy to review. You just jot down your feelings towards them and organize the words as you’re set to let everyone else know. In my case I sometimes don’t even review movies after seeing them the same day but when I have the right things to say about them. Yet once in a while you’ll come across a horror movie that paralyzes you with the catharsis. Rather than the right words you’re left with what I can only make out as this fairly huge cloud of grey mist in your way, keeping you from concentrating on your opinion towards the film. That’s not to say that films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man deserve to be reviewed in the most straightforward review possible. That’s why it’s difficult to even try and talk about it: To call this movie straightforward is to call The Vitruvian man a stick figure. But since there was clearly no comfort zone in making this movie (at least by my American standards) I will adapt that method to my manner of elaborating on the film by fishing for the bits of it that made the most sense to me. I say this because at first (albeit deceptive) glance, you will know right off the bat that the director wished to adapt both Mr. Elias Merhige and Mr. Lynch’s B & W aesthetic. At least up until the pre-torture porn body horror introduces us to the title and we are treated to a weird yet unique 80s vibe that is the industrial atmosphere of its first act. It was here that a world that made sense was starting to shrink as the very much cyberpunk version of Begotten meets Eraserhead (with a tiny precursor to 1998’s Pi) began grasping at anything its own reach exceeded at. Once that sense starts to shrink the film takes advantage of its horror premise to take those extremes even further than too far from a possible homage to Poltergeist to becoming a nightmarish sort of risqué (literally even in the case of the main character). After that’s established it was here that the film found a perfect balance between The renowned extremities of Takeshi Miike’s style and the over-the-top non-sequiturs of Hausu’s brand of horror-comedy. It’s the small bit of common ground I could find from the similar films of its genre and country before, what seems like guest director, H.R. Giger, was allowed to have the time of his life for a minute or two while the original director most likely took a reasonable breather from the weight of his own vision. And that’s really as much sense as I could make out, if not logic, as the film as far as transcended time, reminded me of how entertained Japan was by trauma, and even found a way to introduce the viewer to a world of imagination and wonder underneath the concentrated horror it aimed for. I mean it’s not really that surprising as, much like most horror movies in black and white that came out after Eraserhead, you’re not given much choice but to interpret it once you just experience it for what it is. You certainly can’t watch it with a straight face as it makes one hour feel like two. And as it was ending and I watched the human wires/pipes/scrap metals/etc duke it out, it came to my mind how the more I tried to see it like an 80s movie the more modern it felt, and vice versa. So by the time its entire runtime was an hour in I very much saw the beauty and fantasylike creativity to Tetsuo’s practical horror. Almost even like a techno-John Carpenter (at least to avoid throwing the name of his obvious film around). To wrap-it up: The thing with horror movies, which ones like this remind me of, is that there’s always wonder left to be found in adulthood. It’s easy to show someone who has yet to either enter or leave their teens something wonderful in the form of another genre. But once the horrors of the real world destroy the wonders in that genre's imagination you can either grow out of it or flat out accept horror as a genre in itself willing to replace said wonders. This is probably even the reason why directors like Sam Raimi, James Wan, or Peter Jackson started off with horror before moving on to greater blockbusters for a younger demographic. One could even argue how such case can also be made when children themselves are horrified anyway from a non-horror movie’s one scene that defies its (eventually dated) PG rating. Tsukamoto has given me this and probably more to think about, but maybe that was his goal as far as I know now that the same grey cloud has mostly cleared out.