A man with a purpose hurries down a street lined with crumbling workshops and warehouses. Tugging his cap low, he surreptitiously turns to see who might be watching, and then slips through a door and locks it. The man, it turns out, is a metal fetishist. Why else would he slice open his leg with a straight razor, insert a steel rod and, then, wrap it tightly with gauze? Besides, in the closing credits, he is listed as The Metal Fetishist.  Some unspecified amount of time goes by and the fetishist decides to take a peek at his handiwork. Loosening the wraps, he is greeted by the sight of writhing maggots in his leg, and it dawns on him that maybe he didn't quite think this thing through. With a shriek of pain, fear, or both, the Fetishist slaps at his leg and flees the building--directly into the path of a speeding car. 

Cut to a shot of the Salaryman doing a twisty, David Byrne-type dance as the title, Tetsuo: the Iron Man, rolls across the screen. At home, the Salaryman suffers nightmares and anxiety. As he shaves, a small metallic wart on his cheek spews blood when he pokes at it. His girlfriend admits to feeling a vague sense of dread but they have sex, which only increases their tension. Later, on a bench at the train station, the Salaryman is scrutinized uneasily by a woman in glasses who moves away from him. And then the woman is distracted by what appears to be a mound of organic material--human flesh?--on the ground. She reaches for it and is suddenly consumed by a form of madness--a complete transformation, in fact--and the Salaryman runs for his life. 

And that's just the beginning, so fasten your seatbelts.

The Salaryman is tormented by a terrifying vision in which his sexually insatiable girlfriend mutates into a wild-eyed, Giger-esque siren who sodomizes him with her stainless-steel, showerhead-hose phallus that seems to have a life of its own. In "real life", they have aggressive sex to take his mind off the fact that his entire body has started sprouting nuts, bolts, screws, coils and other assorted metal bits. Pretty soon, he begins to resemble a salvage-yard Robocop in need of a major overhaul. 

"I'm not afraid," the horny girlfriend proclaims. "Nothing shocks me!" But when the Salaryman drops trou to reveal an enormous rotating drill bit in place of his shvantz, she realizes that, perhaps, she should have stayed home and done laundry. What's a girl to do? Hmmm....

The Fetishist reappears from the unlikeliest of places. Like some malign, supernatural forest entity--a transgendered, transhumanized Puck, perhaps--the Fetishist is filled to the brim with malevolent glee and deadly intent as the metal in his own body asserts its dominance. A prolonged Battle Royale with the Salaryman appears inevitable. These two, it turns out, have met before. 

On my first viewing of Tetsuo: the Iron Man, I wondered what the fuck I'd just seen. Initially, Tetsuo seemed to be plotless, an amalgam of shocking, kinetic imagery combining cyberpunk and body horror with a frenzied 1980's MTV energy and early-Lynchian aura: the whole movie could inhabit the same universe as Eraserhead. They certainly share the same grungy, post-apocalyptic atmosphere (and black-and-white photography). In some of its most frightening scenes, Tetsuo recalls Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, and there seem to be nods to Ishiro Honda, David Cronenberg, and screwball comedy, too. 

Watching Tetsuo a second time (the very next night), I saw that I may have been overwhelmed by the continuous onslaught of outrageousness and simply failed to notice the movie's plot. Because, there is one, even though it may be partially obscured by director Shinya Tsukamoto's methods. At its heart, Tetsuo is a revenge thriller that eventually morphs into one of the oddest love stories ever told. It is also very funny but you might have to watch it a few times to fully appreciate the humor scattered throughout the film. (The finale, in fact, plays like pure anime, or maybe a grotesque and wildly frenetic Warner Bros. cartoon.) 

Playing the Salaryman, an energetic Tomorowo Taguchi is edgy and a sight to behold as he morphs from white-collar office worker to writhing mass of hardware. Kei Fujiwara, as his girlfriend, looks like a cross between young Yoko Ono and Theda Bara: an almost-Gothic seductress who's kinky, a little scary and prone to bad judgement. 

Shinya Tsukamoto delivers a bravura, low budget directorial (feature-film) debut that's made all the more notable by the fact that he also wrote, produced, edited and helped photograph the movie, and acted the role of the Fetishist. Originally filmed in 16mm, the movie was later blown up to 35mm, which gives it a grainy, expressionistic look. 

In spite of any comparisons I've made, Tetsuo is a highly original, absurdly creative movie that stands on its own merit. I can't imagine many of my friends ever seeking out this movie, much less sitting through it, so I'd never recommend it to them. However, Tetsuo offers considerable charms to the right audience and, in fact, seems to have found a base that has kept it from sliding into obscurity.