Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

In 1989, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Testuo: The Iron Man felt almost revolutionary. Picking up the body horror elements left behind by directors like David Lynch and David Cronenberg, the film fused together a distinctly Japanese take on cyberpunk with a hyperkinetic visual style that turned the movie into a rite of passage for a new generation of filmakers and fans. There was really nothing else like it. Fast foward a few years and Tetsuo's visual vocabulary would be adopted by Hollywood up-and-comers like David Fincher (the opening credits for Se7en), Aronofsky's Pi,  and the Wachowski’s Matrix films. But Tsukamoto himself had less luck in furthering his influential franchise. After the release of a more narratively accessible, but less unapologetially punk, sequel, Tetsuo II:Body Hammer, the director brought things full circle with 2009’s Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, a one-hour-and-ten-minute refresher course on what made the original so memorable in the first place.

Another non-descript salaryman, Anthony (Eric Bossick) witnesses his son’s death by a mysterious hit-and-run driver. The grief and anger triggers a long-dormant genetic mutation that turns him into a human weapon intent on revenge. But the conspiracy behind his transformation involves parental betrayal and corporate espionage with enemies closing in on every side, making Anthony’s mission to protect what remains of his dwindling family all the more unlikely.

Let’s make this clear up front: The Bullet Man is not a good movie. The acting is dodgy, the casts’ English is even worse and the overall feel is of an effects reel stretched out to within an inch of its life. So, now that that’s out of the way, we can discuss what makes it worth a watch. Tsukamoto is fully committed to recreating his organic metal monstrosity via an array of convincing practical applications and in-camera effects. Sometimes that means looking like a Nine Inch Nails music video (a Tsukamoto collaboration whose music is used in the end credits) but it also has a handmade quality that’s difficult to dissect. The film is cut together with a frenzied energy that has you leaning closer to the screen for a better look, matched with a speaker-shredding sound design that feels less like accompaniment than assault.

Strip away the paper-thin plot and clunky performances, and what's left is a filmmaker chasing pure sensation. The Bullet Man never recaptures the lightning-in-a-bottle originality of the first Tetsuo, but it doesn't really try to. Instead, it functions as a reminder of what made Tsukamoto such an electrifying voice in the first place: an uncompromising commitment to practical effects, industrial textures, and cinema as a physical experience. It's loud, ugly, exhausting, and occasionally exhilarating. For fans willing to overlook its many shortcomings, that's reason enough to take one last look through the scrapheap.

Part of the Unearthed Classics line, the new Blu-ray is gloriously rust-free and includes a couple of interesting extras:  Tom Mes and actor Eric Bossick team-up for a commentary track while an alternate "mixed media" version of the film plays with storyboard and behind the scenes footage.