VividSimon Simply Perfect

Micitype Pretty Good

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Brian Berta Compared to other movies I've seen which I've either strongly liked or strongly disliked, my experience with this one was pretty peculiar. I can't say that I wish I didn't see the film. I also can't say that it was a waste of time seeing this. However, I also can't see myself recommending it to my friends anytime soon or re-watching it again.After a businessman hits someone who recently inserted a rusty, metal rod into their leg, metal slowly starts to pop up on his body as he begins to mutate into a massive chunk of metal.When the film first opens up, you get a couple minutes of quiet and calm pacing showing someone walking down an alleyway. Make sure you enjoy those couple minutes while you have them because the film doesn't give you much time before it quickly turns into a non-stop, frantically paced film with realistic and gory visuals which follows those couple quiet minutes. This film is incredibly fast-paced and it doesn't have any quiet and calm moments after the opening where you can catch your breath. The film is so determined with keeping this pacing that even the credits scene doesn't give you time to relax. I actually really liked its pacing because it made it stand out from pretty much all other films I've ever seen before. It gave the horror genre a great feeling of originality.Speaking of fast-pacing, it also has grotesque visuals and effects to accelerate the film. They look realistic, and it can be a visual train wreck to see metal combine with flesh. The gore in this film is a horror movie fans dream. However, the biggest reason why I think that the visuals work so good is because of the stop motion that many parts of the film has. Considering that its shot in black and white, the stop motion gives it sort of an old, classic feeling. On top of that, seeing the stop motion in some of the scenes made me question why stop motion isn't used much more often in horror films. I feel like it works very good, and it would provide a massive feeling of originality if more films used it. Horror film directors should replace cgi with stop motion practical effects.With all that being said, this film succeeds exceptionally well on visual and technical levels. However, director Shinya Tsukamoto puts so much effort into being a perfectionist in these aspects that he doesn't leave room for anything else besides violence and gore.When I was getting to the end of the film, I kept on asking questions like "When are they going to focus on developing the characters?" and "Why is this whole film treated like its one big action packed climax?". Since character development is so minimal, I did not feel any emotional attachment to the characters, and they just seem like empty shells fighting for their lives. Its great that Tsukamoto was trying to make this film succeed visually and technically. However, as a result of doing this, he, in turn, had to sacrifice character development and depth to keep the outstanding visuals and frantic pacing.Another issue I have with it is that it can be occasionally hard to follow at times. It often jumps from one scene to another so quickly that it can be difficult to tell where the next scene starts and what is happening in it. The most confusing scene is the dream sequence. It made no hints that a dream was going on, and I had no idea that what I saw was a dream until I looked it up online after watching the film. The issue with Tsukamoto's directing is that he assumes you'll be able to figure out what's going on. There were some scenes where I was able to figure out what happened with little to no problem, there were some scenes where it took me a little while to figure out what happened, and there were some scenes like the dream sequence which were so hard to follow that I had to look up its plot in order to understand what happened. There were also a couple scenes which felt completely out of place such as the sex scenes. If your body is mutating into metal, you're not having sex with your girlfriend. You should be frantically trying to do something about it. Also, the film kept on cutting to something which looked to be a sex tape several times. I have no idea what the point of including that was, and I also had no idea what it had to do with the film.In conclusion, I had very mixed reactions to this. While many style over substance films would be dismissed as garbage, this one made its visual aspect so good that it felt like one of the more original horror films in years. Tsukamoto's directing choices helped it to be much better than what it would've been if the visual aspect had been less impressive. Unfortunately, the visual aspect was not enough to distract me from the lack of character development, and it was also a bit hard to follow at times. I feel like there were 2 ways Tsukamoto could've gone about to creating this. The 1st way was to make it like this. The 2nd way was to sacrifice the originality aspect such as the frantic pacing in order to focus more time at developing the characters. I don't know which choice I would've picked, but I can at least give the film a lot of credit for achieving near perfection in the visual aspect, even if the result was style over substance.

Phobon Nika What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? A formulaic lower middle class ill-doing man who is slowly turned into metal through a loosely explained supernatural curse by his victim, a self-proclaimed 'metal fetishist'. Tetsuo presents itself, in essence, as a neo-surrealist assault on the senses from uncharted waters of Far Eastern imagination. This is an odd, obscure and unknown film, and for it to feature on such a list is equally bizarre, so I shall write and write until it seems right for it to. Continuing to elaborate a little on the confusing plot: As the salary-man's transformation gets more and more intense and the central character's girlfriend becomes caught up in the chaos, the fetishist, played by none other than Tsukamoto himself, begins to make personal visits to the newfound iron man's Tokyo household and reveals more ambitious plans for his transformation leading to an awesome and impeccable end sequence. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that. Tetsuo is deeply impressive for the apparatus and funds burnt: a 16mm black and white camera from a back street shop in Yokohama and about GBP10000, Tetsuo's merits, of which on face value they are scarce, but after thought and time on its content and message, they reveal themselves in a flamboyance to elevate Tetsuo to not only one of the best films of its kind, but of its era. In terms of substance, Tetsuo seems thought through meticulously and comprehensively, and if it wasn't, then Tsukamoto is a silent and subdued master behind a camera. The way that the 5 characters develop, ranging from the confused and mulled salary man come iron man himself (Tomorowo Taguchi), his whining and delicate girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara), the callous and psychotic fetishist (Shinya Tsukamoto), his haunting and chilling infected woman (Nobu Kanaoka) and the soft and silky half-time narrator: the doctor (Naomasa Musaka), is immaculate and thorough. I'd like to highlight the train station scene about a quarter of the way through, whereby Nobu Kanaoka makes her striking performance a truly memorable one when she becomes possessed by the fetishist's craft and wit. In terms of style, during this scene, the stop motion techniques used by Tsukamoto to portray the terror in the salary man's face, combined with the menacing soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa, composed entirely out of metallic objects to add to a trippy and naturalistic aura, become unstoppable. As Rene Descartes needed his 'I think therefore I am', his one indubitable truth to build his house of beliefs upon, one bold and malleable scene that showcases a master-class of style and substance is the starting point of more brilliant details of Tsukamoto's creation. Above all, what strikes home the hardest with Tetsuo is that is still remains soundly analytically ambiguous amidst such painstaking aesthetic work. The end sequence, when the fetishist's transformation comes to its apex, and Ishikawa's soundtrack emerges from its disgruntled cocoon into full colour and melody, leaves the reader with an interpretive reflection. Tetsuo could be a metaphorical protest at the destructive potential of Japan's 20th century rapid industrialisation, it could be trying to highlight revenge, sex and technology as the three most destructive forces in our world in a manner that would most definitely stick in the audience's mind, or it could be a message about something more spiritual, possibly related to karma: you mutilate the world and it mutilates you back. At the end of the day, Tsukamoto presents the firepower to please both the sadist and the intellect, which isn't easy, to say the least. It's the work of a miracle.

MartinHafer "Tetsuo, the Iron Man" is among the strangest independent films I have ever seen. It isn't just because of the low budget black and white cinematography but the story--one that is incredibly strange, brutal and surreal. The film is packed with blood, violence and is one best not to watch if you don't have a very high tolerance for this sort of stuff--and my bet is that this includes most people! You certainly wouldn't want to show this to Granny (unless you were trying to kill her) or your kids (unless you want to turn them into psychopaths)! The story is very choppy, has very little dialog and often seems to be missing a clear storyline. It begins with some freaky guy living among metallic junk--and he's shoving pieces of metal into his body! It's pretty hard-core stuff--complete with blood, guts and maggots! Soon, he's run over in an accident that cost nothing to stage--because they don't show the accident in order to save money. Next, a man is talking to his girlfriend on the phone about the incident and tells her he's feeling strange since the hit and run. Following this, the guy has a LONG surreal hallucination about a woman who is made up of flesh and metal--as he, too, is becoming metal. She torments him for a long time, becomes a monster and rapes him brutally. Then, he wakes up to find that while it was a hallucination, he still is having metal erupt from his body. He and his girlfriend then make out like monkeys. All this only in the first 20 minutes of the film!! I haven't even gotten to the portion where he has a giant spinning metal screw for genitals!! Need I go on?! I really don't think so.The bottom line is that this is a film with almost no audience. Unless you love indie horror, Japanese films, extreme violence, sexual sadism AND surrealism, then you'll probably find the whole thing rather repellent. Believe it or not, actually found the film a bit boring after a while because it was so excessive there really couldn't be anything else to offend or surprise me after a while.

Boba_Fett1138 This is definitely one unusual and fine directed movie but it's not quite interesting enough to hold my interest throughout.I absolutely loved the movie for its first part but the movie sort of start to loose it more toward its end. It's already a strange movie for most part but toward the ending things start to make even less sense and you basically start to have no idea anymore what is happening on the screen. You could say that the movie is too long, even though its barely over an hour short. Things in this movie could and should had been wrapped up sooner and perhaps would had been a better watch if it was going somewhere different with its story toward the end.But for most part "Tetsuo" is simply being a visual experience. Just like the original short it got based on, by the same director, the movie focuses on its images and is all about its overall visual orientated directing approach, that makes the movie one weird and intense trip. It's really an artistic movie, that once more shows that movies don't necessarily need to have a real story or point in it to make an intriguing watch.Good and interesting, for most part, if you like 'different' and more artistic cinema.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/