Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

Tetsuo: The Bullet Man won't sit still. The film seethes with energy, Shinya Tsukamoto's camera hurtles around with DV abandon, inducing a low-level kind of motion sickness. Bullet Man is often physically uncomfortable to watch. Following the acrobatic motion of our latest mutated salaryman is impossible. His actions are lost in a hyper-caffeinated jumble of destruction and shocked reaction shots. Although obviously employed to mask a meagre budget, the spasming point-of-view perfectly tallies with the psychological state of a man transforming into a Brutalist art sculpture.

Like Tetsuo: The Iron Man this optical assault is backed with a clanging industrial noise that runs through the film like a malfunctioning heartbeat. It's oppressive, a restless note that implores progression. Tsukamoto brackets revelation with screens filled with writhing wires and scratched up medical stills. Bullet Man is a collage, a feature-length music video able to suggest a level of narrative coherence through visual consistency. Until it decides to unspool and explain things, Bullet Man sings, reorganising the Oedipal trauma of Tetsuo II: Body Hammer using the visual language of the first film. Tsukamoto can't resist unpacking his ideas though. A backstory involving human vivisection and sex robots is undermined by the kind of stilted, stumbling line readings usually heard overdubbing imported 80s anime.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

Lacking the frenetic, fevered energy of its forebear, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer is instead a series of dreamy interludes linked by variations on the same chase. Tetsuo: The Iron Man was a waking nightmare in which a young man struggled to cope with the changes his body was undergoing. Body Hammer, although apparently unconnected, deals with metamorphosis as an ancient abuse regurgitated in times of extreme stress. Iron Man was concerned with the present, Body Hammer is about tapping into the past and divining memory. Tomorowo Taguchi returns as Tomoo, a salaryman who lives, with his wife and son, in an apartment straight out of an aspirational hi-fi advert. Tomoo looks very much like a Steve Ditko drawing, while his wife, played by Nobu Kanaoka, is permanently dressed for a minimalist fashion shoot. This time Tokyo is shot with cool blues, the camera focused in on endless glass buildings and their attendant sense of alienation. When his son is kidnapped by a team of muscle bombers, the salaryman pursues, his body stretching and exploding to reveal a rib cage made from pistols. Iron Man felt like a city collapsing in on itself: circuitry, effluence and people mixing to create a creature able to survive in this steaming pit. Body Hammer instead presents a city locked in stasis. Mutation is something to be forced, often leading to a rusty, clattering failure. Tomoo then represents a pure evolutionary leap. He is the new life form, a stumbling mix of concrete and artillery. A mobile city state able to consume weaklings then spit out carnage.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Writer-director Shinya Tsukamoto shoots Tokyo as a claustrophobic ruin, unfit for human habitation. Tsukamoto's city is a series of tight, cluttered rooms filled with knotted wires and electronic bric-a-brac. Roofs seem far too low: Tsukamoto's characters are always stooping and crawling. They writhe and sweat profusely, the camera pushing in tight on their pained, dripping faces. In this sense Tetsuo: The Iron Man is reminiscent of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Like Ellison's short story, Tetsuo features a handful of humans trapped inside a vast mechanical landscape, suffering at the mercy of some sadistic higher being. Tetsuo's ascended intelligence is The Metal Fetishist, a vagrant played by Tsukamoto that has forced a threaded steel rod into his leg and become a kind of rusting God. After a hit-and-run encounter with a bespectacled businessman and his horny girlfriend, Fetishist transforms into a virulent, mechanical infection that mutates anybody he comes into contact with. Tomorowo Taguchi's salaryman accidentally triggers his own transformation with his electric razor, causing pustulous steel boils to sprout up on his cheek. Tetsuo takes the body-morphing antics of the Japanese superhero genre and wrings them dry. People in Tsukamoto's film don't become cybernetic do-gooders, instead they shred significant others with their drill-bit dicks and dream of the Earth as an endless factory dedicated to liquefying mankind. Power corrupts them instantly.