SHINYA TSUKAMOTO'S follow-up to his unique
half-animated midnight movie Tetsuo: Iron Man is--like The Evil
Dead before it--not a sequel but a higher-budget remake. In Tetsuo
II: Body Hammer, the bespectacled, cypherlike businessman Tomoo (Tomoroh Taguchi) is senselessly assaulted by thugs who goad him into
killing his son. The death is linked to Tomoo's amnesia about his early
life, and the trauma of this killing starts Tomoo into metamorphosing, as
if he were a human transformer robot.
Tomoo is captured by the dangerous Guy (director Tsukamoto, as handsome
and sinister as Frank Langella in his youth and made up with a
convincing-looking cleft palate). Imprisoned, Tomoo is goaded into even
more horrible transformations. Grisly howitzer-sized guns extrude from his
chest and his back whenever he's in a state of rage.
Like Eraserhead, the movie moves along swiftly with barely any
dialogue or exposition. When Tetsuo II: Body Hammer finally gives
us a back story (it has to do with Tomoo witnessing a primal scene), it's
something of a disappointment; we'd have been better off with the mystery.
Like its predecessor, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer is a great yelp of
horror about what an inhuman landscape urban Japan is becoming. Some of
the most fascinating scenes aren't the animated coils of pipes leaping out
of Tomo like mechanical intestines but just the cold, blue-filtered
footage of seeming miles of anonymous skyscrapers. While the film is free
of sentiment and compromise, expanding what should have been a
short film to an hour and a half makes Tetsuo II: Body Hammer as
oppressive as it is impressive.
From
metroactive.com
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