DVD Review - Tetsuo - The Iron Man - Page 3

A fella can smell Frankenstein and Kafka, can smell Raimi and Burroughs and Gibson and Cronenberg, can smell Public Image Limited, even, Joy Division and Eraserhead, Manga and ToHo.

It's possible Tetsuo wouldn't exist without those folks and products, just the same as it's possible Cannibal Corspe wouldn't exist if the likes of Robert Johnson hadn't wandered in fronta microphones way back when. You get the smoke out the eyes for long enough, you can see the winding passages leading from Hellhound On My Trail to Force Fed Broken Glass, even if, for the most part, the latter bears no resemblance whatsoever to the former, although, granted, musicologists still yack on about how Robert Johnson did a mean Entrails Ripped From A Virgin's Cunt back in the day.

Tetsuo is a cut-up monochrome industrial collage, a sci-fi body-horror onslaught with a narrative loose as a coked-up Hilton. It's not impossible to describe it in words, but chances are the words'd make not an inch of sense, chances are the words would be all the pointless in Nevada.

It'd be like trying to describe Bitches Brew with a light-bulb.

It's an aural-visual affair, a sensual concern, how can a man properly distil the effect of the clanging grinding chaos on the soundtrack, the live-action stop-motion metal-bending mania on the screen, the freewheeling cacophonous noise of it all. How can a man ever hope to translate this tomfoolery using a language Tetsuo almost obliterates in the course of its 67 minutes?

Best to note that if the beats read like jazz, Tetsuo plays like demented gabba techno thundering gainst the blackened walls of a cum-soaked city-center nightclub.

What constantly amazes a fella is that the damn thing is almost twenty years old. If a man didn't know any better, hadn't seen the slightly more linear (and, indeed, full-color) Tetsuo II - Bodyhammer or Bullet Ballet or Tokyo Fist or any of the other wonders concocted since then in Tsukamoto's fevered head-holes, he'd have no reason not to assume this fucker wrapped last month. It's eerily resonant, disturbingly contemporary.

These days a man sees fifty Tetsuo's by the time he's walked round the avenue; folks with phones permanently stuck on side of the head, folks sitting in parks with laptops on knees, folks with breasts and bums and balls enhanced, rebuilt, folks defined by the technology they brandish, iPods whipped out pockets like hundred-foot blades, gibbering wrecks suffering through a knackered-modem episode.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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