TETSUO: THE IRON MAN

Director Shinya Tsukamoto / 1989 / Japan

'As surreally weird as Eraserhead and as intense as a Novocainless tooth extraction, Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man is sci-fright as only the Japanese can do it.' – Washington Post

Be warned: this ain't another Marvel franchise. Japanese cult legend Shinya Tsukamoto has long been the kind of director to put Cronenberg to shame, and in 1989's Tetsuo: The Iron Man his most outré, vicious and out-and-out insane inclinations were in more-than-full flight.

From the opening shot, where a young man cuts open his leg and jams scrap metal into it, through to the insane, baffling conclusion, Tsukamoto's film is a headlong, 67-minute battering ram of human madness and metaphorical overload that strains at the very boundaries of narrative cinema.

Overflowing with sex, violence, metal fetishism and total hallucinatory meltdown, Tetsuo: The Iron Man is low budget cult cinema at its absolute cultiest – and most viscerally satisfying. You'll never look at a power drill the same way again.

'It’s hard to overstate the stunning effect of Shinya Tsukamoto’s breakout feature … Equal parts post-industrial nightmare, post-Godzilla tragedy, and post-cyborg fantasy, the movie is all about limits even as it busts through previous concepts of narrative and human-machine ‘relations’.' – Pop Matters

Contains material that may offend

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