It's difficult for me to understand, let alone explain, why I love Shinya Tsukamoto's movies so much. They really aren't much more than diseased cinematic pranks, but there's something unspeakably beautiful about them. I haven't found any other director who makes movies as repulsively absorbing as the Tetsuo films and Tokyo Fist. Seeing a Tsukamoto film for the first time is a singular experience--either you'll vomit or you'll go out and buy every Tsukamoto movie you can find. Some of you may do both.
Tetsuo is perhaps the most primal and visceral of Tsukamoto's films. He opens the movie with the grisly image of a man slicing open his own leg and inserting a metal bar into the wound, and from there the film journeys into a realm few sane people have ever glimpsed. Stop-motion photography, graphic violence, and sexual perversion combine into one of the most horrifying nightmares ever put to celluloid, and it barely ever slackens its pace with dialogue. Watching this movie is all about how much insanity you can endure, and if you can sit through the entire thing, you'll probably end up liking it. This is cinema at its most basic and personal form, and either you identify with its madness or you don't. I did.
For the maximum effect, you have to watch it late at night, in the dark, preferably all by yourself. Anything else would ruin the movie's power.
Tetsuo is perhaps the most primal and visceral of Tsukamoto's films. He opens the movie with the grisly image of a man slicing open his own leg and inserting a metal bar into the wound, and from there the film journeys into a realm few sane people have ever glimpsed. Stop-motion photography, graphic violence, and sexual perversion combine into one of the most horrifying nightmares ever put to celluloid, and it barely ever slackens its pace with dialogue. Watching this movie is all about how much insanity you can endure, and if you can sit through the entire thing, you'll probably end up liking it. This is cinema at its most basic and personal form, and either you identify with its madness or you don't. I did.
For the maximum effect, you have to watch it late at night, in the dark, preferably all by yourself. Anything else would ruin the movie's power.