Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man almost comes off as cinematic punishment. You could point fairly easily to its influences in David Cronenberg’s fascination with the manipulation and combination of flesh and machine, David Lynch’s fascination with sexual repression, abstraction and surrealism, and possibly even the technical achievements of animator Jan Svankmajer. But even if you’re well familiar with those reference points, Tetsuo can still leave you scratching your head and wondering just what the hell is wrong with the Japanese.

The opening moments set the tone for the whole film: An unidentified man comes home to his ramshackle house, proceeds to cut his leg open, and quickly inserts a metal bar into the gaping, bloody wound. Even with proper care and bandaging, the wound sprouts a pile of maggots, which apparently is the ultimate breaking point for the Metal Fetishist. Horribly mutilate yourself? Fine. Insert a metal bar into your leg? Ain’t no thang. Maggots crawling all over your skin? Let the screaming begin!

The Metal Fetishist runs down the road, where he meets his doom at the end of The Businessman’s car. The Businessman is a lonely Japanese bachelor who, soon after the accident, finds himself not only hallucinating, but also finds little bits of metal poking out from his body while in the middle of shaving. The Businessman tries to go on with his life, but soon enough, there’s the old Metal Fetishist, who seems to have been resurrected and is now living in a small piece of machinery on the subway station floor. But wouldn’t you know? He has the ability to possess the living! And that’s exactly what happens when a timid lady sticks a pencil into the mechanical mess.

The newly possessed woman quickly chases The Businessman into the bathroom, where she proceeds to kick his ass so hard, The Businessman literally flies back a couple of miles into a garage. The Metal Fetishist however is on the trail, but the wily Japanese Businessman has enough strength to get rid of the woman with little effort. The Businessman’s overall guilt is rivaled only by his body, which by now is morphing into a flesh/metal hybrid. Of course, with more physical change comes more nightmares, as The Businessman visualizes himself getting anally violated by his girlfriend who is wielding a 6 foot long dildo made of ribbed piping- for his pleasure, I’m assuming.

Giant dildo or not, The Businessman continues his relationship with his girl while trying to hide his ever-changing body, but as soon as he grows a 2-foot-long whirling screw penis, she’s as good as gone. The Businessman's feelings of rejection soon turn into rage, and he makes short work of her in a particularly gruesome style. Meanwhile, in between fixing his hair and makeup, a newly resurrected Metal Fetishist makes a call to The Businessman to give note that he knows exactly what’s going on. With a bouquet in his hand and the urge to kill in his heart, the Metal Fetishist will stop at nothing to get revenge and reveal his true feelings for The Businessman.

On a technical level, Shinya Tsukamoto’s work behind the camera is frantic and gives off a great sense of dread and paranoia. However, the pacing and editing can be quite jackhammer-like, and could dull the mind after awhile. Don’t worry: after the first 25 viewings, you’ll get used to it. You might even be able to watch it without having to take a break. Performances are fairly amateur, though Shinya Tsukamoto would eventually go on to be one of the most tolerable director/actor combos of recent memory. Don’t believe me? Check out the first five minutes of Dead or Alive 2: Birds and see the man work his magic.

At its Cold, Mechanical heart, Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s plot is fairly simple, even cliché. However, Shinya Tsukamoto takes your standard story of revenge and tells it in a rather terrifying way. But not only is it a simple tale of revenge, the themes of alienation are far more interesting. The film is ultimately a story of loneliness and isolation, isolation from nature and more importantly isolation from humanity and emotion. Add on top of this a fine coat of homosexual subtext and you’ve got a pretty good subject for discussion. As soon as the headache dies down, that is.

Video
OUCH! Tartan shits out a PAL-TO-NTSC converted image that is so inept, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was lynched for this. There doesn’t seem to be a single frame of film in this image that isn’t completely marred with ghosting. With such frantic camera work that can sometimes (d)evolve into live-action, stop-motion animation, Tartan does a great disservice to Tetsuo by giving it a transfer like this. On top of that, the image is fuzzy and the grayscale palette often comes off as too light for its own good. Who in their right mind at Tartan could have looked at this disc and thought it was worthy of release? This is worse than one of those porn discs that run four hours long… at least with those discs you know who’s getting fucked.

Audio
The only part of the disc that doesn’t disappoint gravely is the audio selections. You get a fairly decent Dolby Digital 5.1 track, a slightly more active and bass-heavy DTS 5.1 track, and a slightly lacking Dolby 2.0 stereo track. While it’s not the most active mix in the world, the surround speakers get a little bit of love and spit out the grating soundtrack.

Extras
Apparently not wanting to put effort into the release, Tartan dumps a few trailers for other Shinya Tsukamoto films into your lap, like: Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, the enjoyable erotic nightmare A Snake of June, Tokyo Fist, and Tsukamoto’s latest Vital. We also get Director & Crew Filmographies, which is exactly what you would expect, Production Notes (Which mention Cronenberg, Lynch and Svankmajer, though I honestly didn’t read these notes before I made the comparisons), and two extra trailers for Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengence.

Parting Thoughts
A solid little movie gets an unacceptable, highly priced DVD with very little extras. If Tartan isn’t kicking their own ass for this release, I’ll be happy to assist them.