WTF Moments: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

An excerpt from From Hong Kong to Hell, part of The Bad Movie Chronicles by Johnny Rewind.

THE DRILL: The sequence in which the salaryman's anatomy transforms into a rotating power drill is achieved through stop-motion and practical prosthetics on a budget that would not cover a reasonable meal, and it is more disturbing than effects costing a thousand times as much. Context makes everything worse.

THE STOP-MOTION BODY: Tsukamoto animates his lead actor's body transformation frame by frame, creating a twitching, juddering effect that makes the mutation feel genuinely organic in the most completely wrong possible way. Your eyes confirm it is happening. Your brain refuses.

THE SOUND DESIGN: The film's audio is entirely industrial noise — grinding metal, machine hum, electronic interference — with zero conventional music at any point. It sounds like being inside a factory that is malfunctioning and has opinions about you personally.

THE RUNNING SEQUENCE: A scene in which the salaryman is chased through Tokyo by a woman whose face is partially obscured by metal, both of them jerking and stuttering like malfunctioning machines, somehow works as genuine chase cinema despite looking like nothing else ever made before or since.

THE FINAL MERGE: The two protagonists physically combine into a single metal entity in a sequence that looks entirely unlike anything in the history of cinema and costs the viewer approximately seven years of peaceful sleep.

Read the full chapter, with the drinking game and the awards, in From Hong Kong to Hell.

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