Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1992

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer
Shinya Tsukamoto
Japan, 1991, 87 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: Toshiba Emi/Kaijyu Theatre
Executive Producer: Hiroshi Koizumi, Shinya Tsukamoto
Producer: Fuminori Shishido, Fumio Kurokawa, Nobuo Takeuchi, Hiromi Aihara
Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto
Cinematography: Shinya Tsukamoto, Fumikazu Oda, Katsunori Yokoyama
Editor: Shinya Tsukamoto
Art Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Sound: Fukushima Onkyo
Music: Chu Ishikawa
Principal Cast’ Tomoroh Taguchi, Nobu Kanaoka, Shinya Tsukamoto, Keinosuke Tomioka, Sujin Kim, Min Tanaka, Hideaki Tezuka, Tomoo Asada, Toraemon Utazawa

So there’s this guy. This salariman. Nice family, nice job, nice pathetic mall existence. Too bad evil skinheads, dressed in black, want to steal his child, beat up his wife, and do medical experiments on his body. Too bad for the skinheads that this salariman’s body mysteriously mutates into a metallic cyber-gun when he’s mad as hell. Too bad for no one that Shinya Tsukamoto, master of the enigmatic cyber nightmare, is back. His Tetsuo: Iron Man was one of Midnight Madness’s great discoveries: an orgy of gnarled metal, industrial waste, kamikaze violence, and bad attitude. It redefined the dystopic epic, while delivering innumerable transgressions—formal, sexual, and otherwise. Tetsuo I: Body Hammer ups the stakes even further. Watch the delicate constructions of Japanese social strata collapse under the weight of technological demagoguery. Take note of Tsukamoto’s free-wheeling experimental style—that grotesquely realized combination of deranged animation, hyper-camp make-up effects and brutally visceral violence. Learn to love the sight of half-naked skinheads, writhing under the weight of metallic mind-melds. Taste the pain of Tomoroh Taguchi's sweaty, trembling performance as the prostrated salariman. And, if you dare, get ready to see a man, desperate to save his family, lose himself in an oppressive, soul-destroying urban maze—with no place to turn but his inner soul. But even there, in the inner depths of his humanity, lurks a toxic memory so horrible that only a cathartic battle with a long-lost soulmate can bring it to the surface. Prepare yourself for cyberhell.
—Noah Cowan