- Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto
- Writer: Shin’ya Tsukamoto
- Stars: Tomorô Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka
- Run time: 1 Hour, 7 Minutes
- Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/36pI48Q
Synopsis
This black and white film begins with long, panning shots over a bunch of wet-looking metal and junk. The shot concludes with a man, the metal fetishist, jamming a metal rod into his own leg, causing blood to squirt everywhere. He pushes the metal bar down into his leg, sort of like an “interior splint.” He then bandages it and wraps it all up. When he later unwraps it, he finds it covered with maggots and runs away in a panic. He’s then hit by a car and run over as the credits roll. As the title comes up, another man, in a business suit, has some kind of a seizure. Or maybe it’s a weird dance.
The businessman is shaving in front of a mirror and gets a jagged piece of metal stuck in his face. A phone rings, and his girlfriend asks if he’s feeling alright since the hit-and-run accident. He starts getting weird visions of a woman with metal stuck to her face. The woman chases him through the train station. She eventually catches up to him and beats him up with her Borglike implants. They fight, and when he fights back, we cut away to the man in the initial scene who seems to be buried in machines. I got the impression that this may turn out to be some kind of puppet master. The businessman seems to win the battle, but finds that his arm and ankle have metal parts growing out of them now.
Then we get a weird scene where a woman does sexual things with a long metal hose attached where women shouldn’t have a hose. She “rapes” the man with this robotic device. Then he wakes up and everything is normal, except the cut on his face from shaving looks infected now.
Then he has normal-ish sex with his girlfriend, at least until he has a vision of more weirdness followed by his penis turning into a giant drill and destroying the table. That turns out to be just the beginning of his transformation as he then uses it on her. They fight, and there’s a lot of blood. She stabs him in the neck with a knife, but that doesn’t kill him. While he’s unconscious, his robo-penis has a mind of its own and kills the girl.
The man has a dream in which the “metal fetishist” stands up, and we can see him. There’s a man who says “You have a piece of metal inserted in your brain. You shouldn’t even be alive. You’ll die if it’s removed.” The next morning, we find our guy standing in the bathroom, with the metal fetishist laying in his bathtub, and he’s been absorbing the parts from him. He’s now a giant hulk of cables and spare parts.
In a flashback, we see the man and his girlfriend driving down the street and running over the man on the road. They put him in the back of the car and dump him in the woods. Then the two of them have sex in front of the metal fetishist. Somehow, this whole thing is the metal fetishist’s revenge.
The man and the fetishist do battle, and it’s just like something out of an anime or manga. They chase and fight each other all over town, culminating at a junkyard. The man ends up absorbing so much metallic crap that he can’t move anymore. The two end up merging and becoming one combined being, who vows to rust the world.
Commentary
The whole thing was shot in grainy black and white in a frenetic, quick-cut style that just never lets up. The soundtrack is, of course, industrial-metal, and is really good. There’s not much dialogue, and what is there isn’t much to speak of, but it’s clear what is happening once it gets going. There’s a lot of time-lapse and stop-motion animation here, and although there were many times I had no damned idea what was going on, it was intense enough that I didn’t want to look away for a second.
It’s really something. You’ll either love it or hate it, but I’m not going to begin to guess which…