Tsukamoto, Shinya

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Vital

Hiroshi Takagi returns home to begin his new life after having his memory wiped away in an auto accident. Fascinated by a dusty dissection textbook, he enrolls in medical school where he catches the eye of Izumi, a beautiful fellow student who desires his attention. But its another beauty that becomes his obsessionthe dead woman on the cadaver table. Starting with the tattoo on her arm, patterns of recognition begin to return to Hiroshi and soon he is having visions of a life with this woman. The deeper he cuts into her flesh, the closer he gets to unlocking the dark memories of his forgotten past.

Gemini

A startling vision of horror and passion from the director of Tetsuo the Iron Man and A Snake of June! Yukio (Shall We Dance's Masahiro Motoki) enjoys a seemingly successful life with his family including a beautiful but fragile wife whom he met under strange circumstances by a river. However everything changes one night with the arrival of terrifying stranger who looks just like him... with a terrifying secret that will change their lives forever. System Requirements:Running Time 84 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN/LATIN Rating: NR UPC: 014381298925 Manufacturer No: CH2989DVD

Tokyo Fist

Shinya Tsukamoto is most famous for his two Tetsuo films, nightmarish tales of flesh fusing with metal in a hallucinatory metamorphosis that would give David Cronenberg pause. For Tokyo Fist, he leaves the technological transmutations for a bloody bout with flesh, muscle, and self-mutilation, a domestic melodrama gone schizophrenic and emerging as a cyberpunk boxing picture: Raging Bull meets Eraserhead in an all-out sensual assault. Insurance salesman Tsuda (played by Tsukamoto himself) is a social zombie numbed by his deadening job and in a static relationship with live-in fiancée Hizuru (Kahori Fujii), but he is jerked out of his stupor when a former schoolmate turned pro boxer blows into his life. Kojima (the director's real-life brother Kohji Tsukamoto) bullies Tsuda and puts the moves on Hizuru, like a repetition of a decades-old cycle of aggression, but this time Tsuda turns to the boxing club to beat his body into a match for his once and future rival. Tsukamoto's vision of modern Tokyo is an alienated world of disconnected citizens repressing raw emotion under a social veneer of manners and passivity. Uncork the emotions, and faces are pummeled into bloody pulp, boxers broken in the ring, bodies ritually pierced and tattooed... and then it gets weird. The film runs down before the conclusion, but until then it's an unbelievably visceral ride. --Sean Axmaker

A Snake of June

Tetsuo - The Iron Man (Special Edition)

Shinya Tsukamoto draws on the marriage of flesh and technology that inspires so much of David Cronenberg's work and then twists it into a manga-influenced cyberpunk vision. A man (Tomoroh Taguchi) awakens from a nightmare in which his body is helplessly fusing with the metal objects around him, only to find it happening to him in real life... or is it? Haunted by memories of a hit and run (eerily prophetic of Cronenberg's Crash), the man knows this ordeal could be a dream, a fantastic form of divine retribution, or perhaps technological mutation born of guilt and rage. Shot in bracing black and white on a small budget, Tsukamoto puts a demented conceptual twist on good old-fashioned stop-motion effects and simple wire work, giving his film the surreal quality of a waking dream with a psychosexual edge (resulting in the film's most disturbing scene). The story ultimately takes on an abstract quality enhanced by the grungy look and increasingly wild images as they take to the streets in a mad chase of technological speed demons. This first entry in his self-titled "Regular Sized Monster Series" is followed by a full-color sequel, Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer, which trades the muddy experimental atmosphere for a big-budget sheen but can't top the cybershock to the system this movie packs. --Sean Axmaker

Somewhere between nightmare and a techno-fetishist's ultimate fantasy, this extraordinary film from Shinya Tsukamoto caused a sensation when it was first released, and spawned a companion piece, Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer. Concerning itself with a young man's gradual mutation into a metal-being, the film takes a surreal journey into a dark and disturbing world where D.I.Y. body transformations and post-human women with deadly robot arms form the fabric of a strange new reality. Likened to the work of Lynch and Cronenberg, Tetsuo molds explosive violence, bizarre sexual imagery and jet-black humor into a cinematic experience like you've never seen before.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

Two years after leaving the grungy cyberpunk calling card Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto reenters the world of flesh and metal metamorphoses with a more narratively ambitious film that is neither sequel nor remake, but a rethinking of the ideas on a bigger scale with more impressive effects. The film begins in the recognizable world of the thriller, where a young middle-class couples see their son kidnapped by mysterious hoodlums, and then takes an abrupt turn into an underworld of cybermen led by a mad scientist performing twisted experiments. The father (Tomoroh Taguchi, returning from the first film), filled with rage and shame at his powerlessness, suddenly transforms into a robotic warrior and becomes overwhelmed by the power, simultaneously terrified and ecstatic. Unlike in the original, Tsukamoto offers an explanation, for what it's worth, but the power lies not in the story but the nightmarish imagery and the themes of the marriage of flesh and technology, metal and magic. With an ample budget at his disposal (not to mention color), Tsukamoto ups the conflict to a battle of biblical proportions while maintaining the brooding, terrifying, nightmarish quality. Tsukamoto's gory, violent vision of technology run amok is not for everyone, but fans of David Lynch and David Cronenberg will find his dangerous visions just as creatively disturbing. --Sean Axmaker

Hiruko the Goblin

The Story of a radical Archeologist and a junior high teacher that believes the doorway to Ancient evil spirits dimension is located under his School.

Tetsuo: The Ironman

Shinya Tsukamoto draws on the marriage of flesh and technology that inspires so much of David Cronenberg's work and then twists it into a manga-influenced cyberpunk vision. A man (Tomoroh Taguchi) awakens from a nightmare in which his body is helplessly fusing with the metal objects around him, only to find it happening to him in real life... or is it? Haunted by memories of a hit and run (eerily prophetic of Cronenberg's Crash), the man knows this ordeal could be a dream, a fantastic form of divine retribution, or perhaps technological mutation born of guilt and rage. Shot in bracing black and white on a small budget, Tsukamoto puts a demented conceptual twist on good old-fashioned stop-motion effects and simple wire work, giving his film the surreal quality of a waking dream with a psychosexual edge (resulting in the film's most disturbing scene). The story ultimately takes on an abstract quality enhanced by the grungy look and increasingly wild images as they take to the streets in a mad chase of technological speed demons. This first entry in his self-titled "Regular Sized Monster Series" is followed by a full-color sequel, Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer, which trades the muddy experimental atmosphere for a big-budget sheen but can't top the cybershock to the system this movie packs. --Sean Axmaker

Fueled by cyberpunk sensuality and wrought iron perversion, "Iron Man" starts with a bizarre merging of flesh and metal and accelerates into a hyper-hallucinatory state where springs, wires and solder erupt fountain-like from a man's body.

Bullet Ballet