Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

 "We can mutate the whole world to metal. We can rust the world to the dust of the universe.”

This is a very weird film indeed. You knew that. It makes no real narrative sense and has only the barest plot- a “metal fetishist”, fond of grafting random bits of metal into his flesh, is run over by a typical salaryman, who then finds himself being haunted and mutated as revenge. But the plot isn’t really the point. Well, except when it is.

We have so many utterly bizarre and disturbing set pieces. Thd maggots. The weirdest and most unnerving sex scene I may ever have witnessed. The most erotic use of a fork in all cinema.  All to a highly fitting industrial soundtrack which is brilliant in its own right. This is pure body horror, yet the use of metal suggests industry. There can be all sorts of potential metaphors here for what technological civilisation has done and is doing to humanity.

This is really just a series of loosely linked set pieces, and I suppose it has something in common with Un Chien Andalou and its ilk, despite the very different mood which owes as much to alternative culture as it does to the traditional models of ary. As that, it is superb, largely because of the excellence of the cinematography and soundtrack… and the fact that grainy black and white makes it so much less challenging to be convincingly surreal. Yet, beneath all that, there seems to be a subtext. The Industrial revolution, agriculture, all that... is it leading us only to twisted horrors?