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Heavy metal, Japanese style
From Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man' to Japanese horror instigator Shinya Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo,' horror gets around.
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, September 18, 2003
In 1963 a British 4-piece from industrial Birmingham named "Earth" cribbed the name "Black Sabbath" from a Mario Bava-Boris Karloff horror flick and became the rock shears hacking at the stem of America's "flower power." Sabbath sheared Ozzy from its lineup in '78, prompting Osbourne to fly solo, boozing and snorting his way through America's rock celebrity culture like a Union Jack double-decker through the TRL crowd in Times Square. Ozzy bred with Sharon; the Osbournes bred with MTV to create the hallmark of reality television absurdity. His brood has now become one of the most grotesque icons of celebrity culture.
But wait a second. This all started with the filmed marriage of the father of Italian gothic horror and the actor who played Frankenstein's monster. That could be a movie.
The message here is that imported horror has a way of making it to the mainstream. Last year's "The Ring" remade Hideo Nakata's urban legend "Ringu" with Naomi Watts' pearly whites and a handful of extraneous creep-out images.
Last year, Shinya Tsukamoto, whose 1988 film "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" screened worldwide at a record number of festivals, mused in the Midnight Eye about doing a third Tetsuo film entitled: "Tetsuo in America." Two weeks ago "Cabin Fever" director Eli Roth praised Japanese director Takashi Miike's "Audition" (2000) for its pacing and unbridled severity. And he isn't the only one.
Now that a wave of smart, terrifying horror films from the East have formed a market in the states there is no better time to check out where it all began. "Tetsuo: The Iron Man," the original hour-long black and white techno-fetishist nightmare is available for 3-day loan at the Miller Center.
A nameless metals-fetishist slashes his thigh with a jagged piece of metal and pushes a bolt into the wound. The metal festers and sprouts maggot-like spores. The fetishist (played by Tsukamoto) leaps up and bolts out to the street, only to be run down by a salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) and his girlfriend (Nobu Kanoaka). At the second of impact, the camera stops for a '50s style "monster mash" overture, while the camera floats over the car's grill in extreme closeup. The business man returns home but soon finds a metal zit on his cheek. He is changing.
With a crash beginning the augmentation of flesh by metal, Tsukamoto seems to be honoring David Cronenberg, the Canadian director whose willingness to manifest unspeakable body horror has created at least one god-awful image in each of his films. Tsukamoto has at least three here, including the exploits of a spinning auger tipped phallus. Tsukamoto uses sex to consummate the marriage of flesh and iron. The deeply disturbing acts in this film convey the release of dark pleasures, as well as the curse of a changing society. For a glitchy, hyperactive feel, he uses stop-animation. This pushes the viewer through this MTV-paced trip, without even the slightest feeling of control.
Clips of refineries, flying sparks and liquid metal-filled cauldrons attempt to explain the film's obsessive take on iron as do the actions of the film's central characters. The spasmodic fetishist Tsukamoto worships this neo-nature, impregnating himself in the film's first scene. The salaryman is an innocent bystander caught up in physiological revolution, and ultimately forced to embrace it.
"Tetsuo: Iron Man," as its title suggests, is a monster movie. It's part Godzilla at heart, spiced by snappy dialogue and gleeful, childish fantasies of world-domination. And it leaves us with a great line. Tsukamoto, riding on a now jaba-the-hut-sized Taguchi says "Do you want to turn this whole world into metal?"
And the Iron Man says: "Sure."
Tetsuo 3: Coming soon to America?
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