tetsuo - Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a 1988 Japanese film by cult-film director Shinya Tsukamoto. This, his third film, is an extremely graphic but also strikingly-filmed fantasy shot in the same low-budget, underground-production style as his first two films. Tetsuo established Tsukamoto internationally and created his worldwide cult. It was followed by Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. The film opens with a man (called only'the man', or sometimes the'Metals Fetishist') tearing open a massive gash in his leg and shoving in a piece of scrap metal. Upon seeing maggots festering in the wound, he screams, runs out into the street, and is hit by a car. The driver of the car (cult actor Taguchi Tomorowo) tries to cover up the mess by dumping the body into a ravine, but the dead man comes back to haunt him -- by forcing his body to gradually metamorphose into a walking pile of scrap metal. In one of the film's most controversial sequences, the man discovers his pnis has mutated into a gargantuan power drill, and his girlfriend willingly copulates to death upon it. The film ends with a duel between the man and the Fetishist with the pair transformed into a giant mutated monster. One of the main themes of the movie is the main character's latent homosexuality. Some critics have seen this film as being a literal use of a metaphor, showing mankind's dehumanization and'becoming the machine'. The scene involving the businessman killing his girlfriend with his own pnis-turned-powerdrill is indicative of the dehumanization. The setting, which shows modern Japan as an industrial wasteland, suggests a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Some critics have suggested that Shinya Tsukamoto was making a statement on the dehumanization of industrialized Japan and the Japanese corporate culture. The film can also be seen as a comment on impotence as a metaphor for the feeling of alienation and helplessness in the face of byzantine corporate culture and modern urban life. The main character 'salary man' and his wife react with sexual arousal after they run over the metal fetishist, and the salary man is very different after the appearance of his'power tool pnis' from his former corporate-puppet-self. It is suggested that this state of virility is different from before the hit and run accident. The iron/machine-mutation comes to represent personal empowerment, with both good and bad sides to it. This is even further underscored by the shape of the mutated creature which appears at the end of the film, which is more than a bit similar to an erect pnis. It has been often discussed that Tetsuo is a metaphor for the spread of the AIDS virus. The film is Unrated but contains substantial strange violent and sexual imagery. The film is also discussed in Clive Barkers'A-Z Book of Horror'. The DVD has been released in America and elsewhere from Tartan Asia Extreme.