The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo

Here's an early Super 8 film that Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo, Tokyo Fist), made after Phantom of Regular Size and before Tetsuo. It actually quite elaborate for something done in 8mm, in fact nearly as elaborate as Tetsuo and it's nearly as long as well, clocking in about 50 minutes. It's also done in color, like Phantom of Regular Size, is in color, so it kind of looks more like Tetsuo II than the Tetsuo. I saw the film in raw Japanese, so the plot made no sense whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure that even if I perfectly understood Japanese I wouldn't get the plot. It does has far more dialogue than Tetsuo, however, so maybe there's something I'm not getting. It involves a boy with a weird electric pole sticking out of his back. He's constantly being bulled by other kids and he only has one friend. And to make things worse, he's then whisked off to an alternate dimension world where these weird vampires rule the planet (Tommoro Taguchi and the director himself both play vampires). Then the plot gets really weird, as the kid teams up with this lady with a book on her head to fight them. Then there's lots of sick blood draining, nudity, blood curdling screams, transformations, and the kid learns to use his electric pole to light bulbs and meets another electric rod man like himself.

As I said, this movie is very, very weird, but it has that wonderful independent film spirit that most of Tsukamoto's films have and it's very interesting to watch someone's early movies. A better quality, subtitled version would be nice someday and maybe I'd be able to understand this plot just a bit better.