Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

The original 'Tetsuo' knocked me out with its inventiveness and disturbing originality. This sequel/remake/cash-in (whatever you want to call it) bored me witless. The budget is obviously increased, the ideas and confrontation decreased. 'Tetsuo' is a much more difficult movie to watch/understand but it is worth it. 'Tetsuo II' is way to conventional, with a "plot" and "characters", and loses the unique vision and mystery of the original. What you end up with is a dumb ass action movie - the complete antithesis of 'Tetsuo'. Avoid this, watch the first movie instead.

This movie is highly recommended for the fans of its predecessor, although it's not in black and white, doesn't have as good of a soundtrack or have as much surrealism as the first film, but it remains to be a bit more action-packed and (let's not forget) makes a bit more sense. This time, the salary man (the protagonist from the first film) lives a normal life with his family until one day his son gets kidnapped and the salary man is forced to be experimented on by a large a gang of skinheads which speeds up the mutating process of becoming a part-metal weapon and part-human being. It's not really a sequel but it surely is one of the greatest underrated films of-all-time and is about as good as the first film (TETSUO), if not, better.

The bad things here: repetitive music, shaky cam, most of the action takes place in scenes where the light is obscured a lot. There is only one sound for the protagonist.

The good stuff: manic overacting, great VFX, Shinya Tsukamoto as the main villain, insane sweaty buff monks. Lots of body horror albeit a bit light.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer is Tsukamoto's Evil Dead II, a sequel that reworks the original with more technical polish on a larger budget. There's a big thematic shift from the erotic to the militaristic, with a greater focus on biogenetic weaponry, one that's far less frantic, instead focusing on developing its characters and providing them with a narrative to inhabit. The production values are much higher than that of its predecessor with Tsukamoto's head-spinning experimentation still on full display, the move away from monochrome allowing him to add strong colour filtration to a heady visual brew of crazy editing and bizarre cinematography. Shinya Tsukamoto is a man who knows what he's doing at this point. Ultimately while Tetsuo II: Body Hammer may lack the more disturbing elements of the original, the eccentricities are still here; filled with some excellent sequences and something to say about industrialisation while incorporating some top-notch effects work, leaving it as a very solid piece of filmmaking and a prime example of confrontational underground Japanese Cyperpunk cinema.

What a movie. You don't stumble onto a film like Tetsuo II: Body Hammer every day, and that's probably a good thing. The jerkier-than-Blair Witch cinematography, the wild & crazy stop motion special effects, and the bucketloads of gore are fairly sufficient to ensure that some viewers won't like this movie. Since you're actually reading this, though, you're probably a pretty jaded and open-minded film fan, which is exactly the audience that would end up liking Body Hammer. It's one of the craziest and most extreme movies I've ever seen, particularly in the brutal, nearly unwatchable flashback sequence which occurs in the last twenty minutes. It's one of those scenes that you never, ever, ever forget. But aside from the brutal and bizarre violence, there is great artistry here; the scenes between Taniguchi and his family strike a real chord of tragedy, and the special effects somehow succeed precisely because they DON'T look real at all. And Tsukamoto's vision of Tokyo is terrifying-- he makes the city look like a nearly uninhabited frozen hell of silent glass towers and crumbling steel factories. If any of this sounds appealing, you might just like this movie as much as I do. Tsukamoto's style can be incredibly jarring, but you'll end up running out to find everything else he's directed (to my knowledge, his only other films available in the US are the original Tetsuo and his horrific boxing film Tokyo Fist). Shinya Tsukamoto is one of the most inventive directors alive-- you never know what abomination he's going to create next. And Tetsuo: Body Hammer might just be his best film.