Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988) REVIEW

Foto por: Dominic Alves

*The following review speaks about graphic material, reader discretion advised.

I’m aware that Valentine’s Day is arriving shortly in a few days, but unfortunately for you readers I will not be reviewing a romantic comedy or anything of the sort. This is because I saw the following movie recently and found it to be very different to what I’m used to watching, also didn’t feel like being another romantic cliché.

This film is not for everyone, not many will understand the message behind all of the bizarre factors going on. There will be moments where the camera work might make you a bit dizzy, so many things happening at once might make you feel overwhelmed and the main thought crossing your mind constantly will be ”What am i watching?” or ”What is going on?” It’s a whole new visual experience with a theme that still has great impact even decades after it was made. For it to be a small budget film, it was very well made, refreshing in it’s style of black and white footage along with the fast pase scenes created by stop motion shots to resembler our fast paced lifestyles, the plot line didn’t leave room for getting to know the characters very well, everything went by quickly, inspired a few unintentional laughs, but it was enjoyable. Japanese director Shinyu Tsukamoto even made 2 sequels after this hour long feature, that still include the main theme of this film.

The film begins with a mysterious man hiding somewhere with many metal objects lying around and inserting a metal tube into his knee; gets stranger by the minute don’t worry. He runs out to the street and gets hit by a car when he sees his fresh wound is getting infested by maggots. After this incident the man who ran over the previous man from the beginning, starts to go through a horrifying transformation which involves metallic objects to grow out off his body causing him to cause a lot of harm; he somehow got infected with whatever disease the mysterious man had after him and his girlfriend dump the body.

Behind all of these bizarre events lies the theme of how metal and technology is slowly taking over our lives, making us lose our traditional values and letting ourselves unknowingly be consumed; which was the antagonist’s main plan. In a way this is slowly becoming our reality, decades after this movie was made it’s theme is still strongly relevant as technology keeps advancing. The music score terrified me and some scenes brought shivers down my spine, the visuals were overwhelming at times I felt dizzy and confused (not going to lie here, first time I saw this I had zero clue of what was going on because of how fast paced it was and how sometimes things just seemed to happen for no logical reason).

However it was an interesting film to watch, never seen anything like it, will always praise its style but I feel it may have been a bit too much for me. So if you’re planning to watch this please have some patience with it, the plot can look messy and make you get lost along the way at times. Yet it is always good to watch films like this because were not used to such things, give it an opportunity at least.

Hope you enjoyed my brief review on this body horror classic, and I will keep you updated on new film reviews. Bye!