Review of Tetsuo: The Iron Man

This really is one crazy mental movie, vying with David Lynch's Eraserhead for most bizarrely freakish bit of black and white weirdness. Piling some really quite disturbing imagery into a melange of stop-motion animation, sped-up and slowed-down film and lots and lots of fast-cut montages, this gradually builds into an at least slightly coherent plot involving a man slowly turning into a giant metal monster, then fighting some kind of rust-man-woman-thing on jet-powered skates. All of which is pretty much subordinated to the often almost nauseating power of the images. There's plenty of blood and gore on show here as people find various metal objects growing into and out of their bodies, fighting each other and at one stage having some pretty gruesome metal-on-flesh sex when our 'hero' sprouts a big scary drill from his groin. This is visceral viewing at best, perhaps one of the most intense and disturbing films ever created, definitely not for the fainthearted. If you can handle it though it is an interesting exercise in how extreme a filmmaker can be, and also asks some important questions about the predominance of the artificial in the modern world and the possibility of bionic implants creating a man-metal hybrid. A definite must-see for anyone interested in extreme cinema