2/5 New Tartan DVD sounds great, looks terrible!
  by Ronnie Sortor (Springfield, MO USA)
The rating is for the lousy transfer of the new Tartan DVD release. TETSUO is one of my top-ten favorite movies of all time. Purchasing this new release represented a quadruple-dip on this title. First was a bootleg vhs tape back in the early 90's followed by the official Fox-Lorber tape, then the first DVD. The main reason, other than my love for the movie, for buying again was for the new 5.1 sound mix because TETSUO has a great soundtrack. Tartan did a great job with the remix. I love it! It's really impressive in my home theater. But the image doesn't live up to the audio, especially projected on my big screen. It looks like they just did a cheap transfer of the PAL master (Tartan is a UK company, I believe) to NTSC because it's riddled with artifacts like ghosting during fast movements (there's a lot of that in this film) and the image is very soft and contrasty. The old Fox-Lorber DVD from '98 has more image detail, especially in shadows, and none of that ugly ghosting. I assumed that since it's 2005 now and most DVD companies have kept up with the state of the art, knowing that audiences are more discriminating about audio/video quality, Tartan would live up to our expectations. But, no.
I see that there are several sellers dumping their old discs here at Amazon. I recommend that you just pick up one of those rather than Tartan's shameless release...

5/5 c'mon (saa koi)
  by matt (mtchu@conncoll.com) (neo-tokyo)
Testsuo: the iron man may be a difficult film for a lot of people. you will probably either love it or think in is trash. this film struck a deeply personaly chord within me, so it is difficult to write about it objectivly. as a teenager i dreamnt of a film shot in gritty black and white that would deal with terrifing and ghostly subjects. this film is it. tsukamoto is a genius for this film. the effects are low buget to the max, but when is the last time your nightmare had a big effects buget? the film actually follows a plot line somewhat resembling a Noh play, except very convoluted; the man runs the fetishist over with his car, and then has sex with his girlfriend in frount of the fetishist's broken body. because of this sexual arousal in the presense of machine induced death, the man is cursed with his sexual/physical merging with the machiene realm. the fetishist wants revenge. the visual effect of the film is beyond incredible, and the music is perfect. very few films incorporate music into the visuals as fundamentally as this one (bergman's Persona and otomo's AKIRA are also great examples). this film implanted itself into my brain like a shard of metal. keep an open mind when you watch this film, and don't jump to conclusions and judgements. if you can withstand the films attack, you will find it to be truly beautiful and rewarding.

4/5 A completely unique experience!
  by Charles G. Fry (Madison, WI)
Tetsuo is not for anyone that's the least bit squeamish. For the rest of us, it is an absolute wild ride. The movie is black-and-white, hyperkinetic, and totally unique. The story makes only some sense, but it is the visuals and music that work here.

Shinyo Tsukamoto uses fast cuts, weird camera angles, and the black-and-white film to great advantage in Tetsuo. Every frame is overloaded with detail, and the metallization of people in the movie is more a weird combination of tubes, wires, and cables than anything else. Visually, this movie is unique, and Chu Ishikawa's soundtrack fits it perfectly. You will just sit there, and say something like: whoa, what the heck is going on!!

Tetsuo II is completely different; hard to believe Tsukamoto also directed it. It is worth seeing only to fill in some of the holes the first movie leaves in the story. But unfortunately, the hyperkinetics and great visuals are completely gone.

I did not give Tetsuo 5 stars because of an overly graphic section about midway through the movie; it is a humorous section initially (you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it), but Tsukamoto takes it too far. Otherwise, Tetsuo is a great movie.

4/5 A horror film about being gay in Japan...
  by Dan Seitz (Somerville, MA, USA)
First of all, let me state something that nobody seems to want to say explicitly; this is one unnerving movie with some of the most unpleasant scenes I've ever seen, and that includes Cronenberg. Also, there's an undeniable homoerotic subtext to the whole thing (and I'm not inferring; it's pretty clear, despite the lousy subtitle job Image subcontracted out.)

As far as comparisons go, this is a lot like the work of Jan Svankmajer, in terms of effects and narrative feel (and I suspect Tsukamoto knows the work of Svankmajer well.) But the material is about as far from Svankmajer's social concerns as you can get.

I don't claim to know Japanese society that well, but I DO know it wasn't (and still isn't) nearly as tolerant as the US, and "Tetsuo" is a strong reflection of that. The main character is a man who is torn apart by guilt over a crime he has committed, and also for his failure to conform to societal standards. He is terrified of women, and he also resents them (epitomized in two extremely gory and unnerving scenes.) And because, one feels, that he's told that he's unnatural and inhuman, he BECOMES unnatural and inhuman, literally an iron man.

This is not a upbeat story; this is a story about a man who has destroyed himself and achieves the power to take the society that caused it down with him. Even finding love isn't enough for him. This is a movie about a man who is twisted and warped by society, and who will destroy everyone thanks to that society.

Personally, I found it fascinating, but unless you've explored Jan Svankmajer, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and others extensively, I would be careful about approaching this. Put it this way; if you weren't bugged by "Crash" but found it interesting, "Tetsuo" won't be too much for you.

3/5 CHAOS IN BIONIC
  by Eduardo C. Dayao (Quezon City, Metro Manila Philippines)
Do androids dream of electric sheep? Maybe. This, then, could be their nightmare. Or what passes for a bad peyote trip for them. Ferric and feral, Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 debut, where an unassuming Salaryman (Tomoro taguchi) mutates into a bio-mechanical living weapon, is a fractured-reality must-see. Set in a neither-here-nor-there Japan only a fever-wracked noggin could hallucinate, this isn't Japan as hypermodern sci-fic megacity. Rather, it's blighted underside. Its scummy industrial backdrop is all derelict factories, corroded steel, tarnished chrome and frayed cordite. Lynchian deja vu might set in but "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" exists in its own techno-erotic purgatory, and one that gets farther under the skin than "Eraserhead" ever did. Tsukamoto's closer kindred spirit seems to be David Cronenberg. Tsukamoto seems taken with the same apocalyptic neuroses as Cronenberg : men terrorized by their own malfunctioning bodies, the evolutionary possibilities of changeling flesh. But Tsukamoto's far less arctic and cerebral. Basic instinct confronts the abstract by assigning order to the chaos. And the retina-scorching transmutations can get so out-there, you might want to believe they're metaphors: for the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic,a familiar tsukamoto kink. Or maybe it's all a blackly comic send-up of the mechanisation of the social psyche. But such rationalizations neither deepen the mystery nor heighten the rush. Tsukamoto doesn't really want us to decipher the enigmas. It's the text, not the subtext, that matters. He's pushing a different kick: the pure, twisted and unsettling sensation of watching the Everyday splinter into the irrational, pulling us into a state of anxiety whose very lack of balance is its chief psychoactive. It's the adrenaline of entropy, the poetry of confusion. It's blood and energy, full-on. And Tsukamoto's arsenal certainly has explosive. It's like fragmentation grenades to the brain pan. It's vast. It's hyper. It's ultraviolet and futuristic. But. Tsukamoto , soon enough, ODs on his own momentum. Watching "Tetsuo:The Iron man" in one go can get as exhausting as memorizing Calculus equations while doing High-Impact Aerobics on a ton of caffeine. Everything verges on sensory overload in the final 4th. Shortcircuit. Then you crash. But before that happens, you'd have gotten your chromosomes mad-scrambled by what is still , ten years or so down the line, one of the most unforgettable chunks of weird science, death-metal nihilism and low-tech rage against the machine.