Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 7.0 | 15/32 | 2nd film in franchise 7/7 | Body Horror 1/4
A finger gun pointed at a guy in a tunnel. The finger gun goes off, killing the man. It’s Yatsu. His heart is metal, connected by vacuum tubes.
Taniguchi Tomoo wakes up next to his wife. He has breakfast with her and their son, Minori. Tomoo does not remember his childhood, but he remembers green fields. The steel blue city’s endlessly reflective surfaces, ringing phones, and industrial noise are the only life he knows.
His family goes to a mall and encounters two men, members of a cyborg cult. The men follow them through the record shop. They grab Minori and run off.
After a long cat and mouse, the cult members have Minori on the top of Tomoo’s apartment. Tomoo stands in front of them. Steam billows from his body as his arms become a cannon. The man holds Minori over his head. Tomoo shoots. When the smoke clears, the man holds Minori’s hands over his head, his face covered in viscera.
Tomoo accidentally killed his son.
Metal links surround him, entangle him. Visions flicker like channels changing stations. He remembers.
The movie is not a sequel to Tetsuo The Iron Man, but a high-budget re-pass on the themes. Like the previous film, the story is only a loose thread to depict a man becoming a machine.
I was worried that, with a higher budget, this would have fewer charms. And while the movie doesn’t have the pure chaos of the first one, it has some killer special effects and visuals. We still get some stop-motion transformation scenes that are pretty sick.
This one is less sexual — no pipes sexually inserted in legs or drill penises. It’s also more political — to survive in this world, you must become a machine, whether you want to or not.
Regardless, this is a radical piece of 90s cyberpunk weirdness.