Tetsuo Iron Man

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1990

Tetsuo: Iron Man
Shinya Tsukamoto
Japan, 1989, 67 minutes
Black & White/16mm
Production Company: Kaiju Theatre
Producer: Shinya Tsukamoto
Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto
Editor: Shinya Tsukamoto
Art Director: Shinya Tsukamoto
Sound: Asahi Sound Studio
Music: Tadashi Ishikawa
Principal Cast: Tomorrow Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Shinya Tsukamoto, Naomasa Musaka

Imagine if Robocop starred in David Lynch’s Eraserhead in Japan. An unsuspecting man is attacked in the subway by a ferocious woman with a metal hand. Later he is sodomized by a seductress with a metal hose for a phallus. He is transformed into Iron Man. His fate was determined when he drove his car into a serious accident—and then dumped the body, having sex over the writhing figure below. Iron Man cannot control his new drill-like penis and its emotions. He attacks his girlfriend, but she kills him. Unhappy to lose him, she commits suicide. Upon awakening as Iron Man, he tries to resurrect her, succeeding only to rouse a nasty character indirectly introduced at the beginning of the film. They engage in a desperate and ultimately futile struggle until the God of the mechanical world, dressed as a dockyard rubbie, makes a cameo. He bashes the combatants with his penis/rod until the evils of the mechanical world transform them all into a monolithic moving scrapheap.

Visually similar to the infamous Lynch film (Eraserhead), Iron Man is even more deranged. It is shot in grainy black and white, with jump cuts, almost no dialogue, a harrowing industrial music score and some of the most inventive costume and gore effects seen in ages. This version of “people as machines vs. people interacting with machines” far supercedes Verhoeven’s cop thriller (Robocop). But it is Shinya Tsukamoto’s brutally dark sense of humour that destines Iron Man to become the cult classic it is at home.
—Noah Cowan