Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992)

Hell is industrial. It is red and stinks of molten iron and sweat, it reeks of outrage and desire. Life in Tokyo, on the other hand, is blue and sterile. It's not really life at all. It's where men spend their years repressing their feelings under the cultivation of model domestic conformity and dreaming at night of grassy fields they no longer remember the colors of.

Shinya Tsukamoto's second Tetsuo film is not a sequel but a companion piece, another take on the same premise and themes of the first. Tomoro Taguchi again plays a salaryman, this time named Tomoo and married to a wife named Kana. Tomoo and Kana have a young son, Minori. One day two thugs (reminded me of the punks from Jean-Jacque Beneix's Diva) assault the family while out shopping at a mall. After injecting Tomoo with a foreign substance, the thugs initiate a campaign of terror involcing the kidnapping of the boy. Their purpose is to trigger a transformation in Tomoo. They succeed, and the results are monstrous – for Minori most of all.

The thugs are part of a cult led by Yatsu (Shinya Tssukamoto), a mysterious figure with the bizarre ability to turn his body into mechanized weaponry. Yatsu and his gang live in a factory and spend their hours bodybuilding – metaphorically hammering flesh and bone into hardbodies that gleam like polished metal. They serve a shady experiment in mad science with Tomoo as their chosen target for reasons that Yatsu will reveal over the course of the film.

This is Tsukamoto's second feature film in color, but the first in which he applies it to his personal aesthetic (Hiruko the Goblin having been work for hire). He's stated that the Tetsuo movies were born of his hatred for the city and the impossibility of retaining any relationship with nature there. His Tokyo is a place of hard, featureless surfaces as far as the eye can see: glass, concrete, tile, chrome. The lights are cold there. Tsukamoto shoots almost the entire movie stressing blue or red with lighting or filters. Tomoo's world is blue, but when he begins to push himself at a gym both his skin and the chromed weight machine reflect the subtlest hints of red – a warning.

Tetsuo II is not well regarded by most fans of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. That's unfortunate because it's a more accomplished piece and still a kick in the head, but it's an understandable response. In the earlier film, Tsukamoto was refining techniques he had explored on home video without a budget and the result was an anarchic howl that apparently spat on comforting filmic conventions. It was a breathless fusion of cocaine, adrenaline, and lust. No wonder it gained a cult following, and no wonder that a followup would inevitably fail to be as fresh or as jolting. Still, anyone who had seen the director's short film A Monster of Regular Size should have predicted this trend because it's the same story in even less coherent form – The Iron Man was the second version, and the process of refinement and added coherence had already begun.

With this third version Tsukamoto adds nothing new to his bag of tricks (shocking fast cuts, stop-motion, Raimi-esque camera moves and wirework among others) but he hardly needs to. By now he kows the tricks well enough to employ them with confidence and authority. Instead, Tsukamoto shifts his focus to advancing his skill as a storyteller. What he comes up with is much more straight-forward in narrative yet more ambivalent in treatment, and more nuanced.

Start with Tsukamoto's favored structure of two men at war with each other and the woman caught in the middle. One man, the antagonist, usually sees something in the other that reflects himself and sets out to transform the protagonist. How this affects the woman is never the same from one film to the next, and the women of his early films went unexplored. In Tetsuo II Kana seems to exist to underscore the idea that male sexuality is by nature all about an innate desire to destroy. She stands out as both the only female in the movie and the only one in the film whose response to loss and grief is not wholesale rage. This is spelled out in stark terms in a sex scene late in the film. Personally I think it's a simplistic, mistaken view of both genders and is actually a step backwards from a more complex understanding expressed in the first film, one he would return to in Tokyo Fist. Really? Women have no capacity for violence or destruction? Wendy O. Williams would have disagreed. Even so this film introduces a vital ingredient that went missing before: empathy, expressed by Kana and even Yatsu himself. It's the beginning of humanism in Tukamoto's body of work, the one element without which he'd not be one of my favorite filmmakers. Tetsuo II is still an apocalyptic vision that suggests the only way to be at peace is to be the last man standing.

In another nuance, this Tetsuo offers no alternative to the sterility of the city. Instead of embracing the howl of anarchy in the face of conformity, the solution proffered by Yatsu's tribe is fascism – that's no path to freedom!

The movie still has enough horror to qualify for the genre, but feels more like a comic book – a true manga (it's not for the kiddies!) or something out of The Incredible Hulk. When Tomoo Hulks out he has a grin that would scare even the Joker.

Hiruko the Goblin (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1991)

There's a quiet, lovely scene in Hiruko the Goblin in which the camera lingers on the face of a beautiful young woman singing a lullaby as she floats in a lake, gazing up at the night sky with serene  mists rising around her. It's such a lovely, peaceful scene that you might forget for a moment that her head is no longer attached to a body. These days it's getting around on spider legs.

Similarly the film's cheerful goofiness, pastoral scenery, and stock plot specifics (family legacies, hidden portals to Hell, prophecies and the like) might make you forget that Hiruko the Goblin was directed by the guy who made the hyperkinetic Tetsuo: the Iron Man. In fact, Shinya Tsukamoto's second feature film is not his own material, and he consciously chose to lend it very little of his own style. Tsukamoto was hired by the studio to direct, and thought it best to take a more standard approach. Instead of monochromatic gritty psychoscapes we get some beautiful shots such as an early scene of a girl bicycling past rolling green fields on a Summer's day. That's not to say Tsukamoto's touch is entirely missing, but I'll get to that.

Hiruko the Goblin concerns a prophecy about a portal to the Goblin underworld situated on a school's grounds. The secret is stumbled upon by a number of people: Professor Yabe, who quickly goes missing; Yabe's son Masao, who pines for fellow student Tsukishima (it's her head in the lake, now embodying the loosed title Goblin); and underdog archeologist and inventor Hieda, once a family friend of the Yabes. Hieda was loved by Masao's Aunt, who died on an expedition with him. Masao has never forgiven Hieda, but the two will find a common bond in grief for their lost loves.

Never mind, Tsukamoto isn't too fussed with that and you shouldn't be either.. He's far too busy having fun chasing our heroes around the school with scuttly severed heads and creepy janitors who know more than they let on. This is where Tsukamoto's hand becomes recognizable as he lets loose with more Sam Raimi-inspired camera inventiveness, and where the movie is at its most enjoyable. Mind, the similarities to Evil Dead end there, Hiruko's scares are of a good-natured, family-friendly spirit but for some amount of blood. Quirkiness and oddities abound. Like Tsukamoto, Hieda loves to conjure thingamabobs and whirlygigs out of household goods, then employ them in battle against monsters out of a mad toddler's dreams. Meanwhile, Masao suffers burns on his back in the likenesses of the goblins' victims.

Hiruko the Goblin is a slight movie and not one of the director's signature works. I'm sure there';s material I could mine and this is admittedly a superficial look at it...but that's what comes across. Even so, it's an amusing little diversion - a light comedy with arterial spray.

Drácula (George Melford, 1931)

You know the backstory to this Spanish-language alternate release already. Universal wanted their Dracula in the Spanish-language market but lacked adequate tech to dub the film.  Their solution, not uncommon at the time, was to film it twice: when Browning and Lugosi went home for the night, another director and a Spanish-speaking cast would make the same film with the same script and sets. The question is how well it stacks up. IMO, not that well, although I'm always on flux on this one. Admittedly I was thrilled to see it when it was released on VHS years ago and thought it a thorough delight. I'm not unappreciative now and am glad to own it but my joy at having it colored my appraisal at the time. Perhaps I'm too dismissive of it now. After all, it is the same script and the production values are the same.

Overall the direction and cinematography are workmanlike. Shots are most often of the proscenium arch type, lit with no attention to mood or depth, exposing the sets as exactly that and no more. The compositions are dull, the blocking of the actors is transparent...it's a stage mentality that speaks of inexperience with or indifference to cinema, a distinct lack of curiosity for the possibilities of film. You need more than the occasional unmotivated dolly shot to make a film fluid! This alternate version fails to evoke the atmosphere of the Lugosi version, and I'm thinking now that I haven't given near enough credit to Browning – the Spanish version also lacks a score, so that could hardly have been the whole of what I responded to before.

There's also a glaring lack of fog, not least of which when the dialog makes a point of directing our attention to it...

Testimony has it that Melford and company watched Browning's dailies, and accordingly recreated what they felt worked or improved upon what didn't. Well, the star was paying attention (see below) but I'm not so sure about the rest. Consider the passage below from both versions:

(Van Helsing examines Mina's hidden neck wounds as Dracula arrives)

the Browning:

Harker: What could have caused them?

Maid (offscreen, announcing a guest): Count Dracula!

The Melford:

Van Helsing: How long have you had these marks?

Eva: Since the day before yesterday.

Maid: Conde Dracula!

Not all of the movie is that flat, but most of it displays a tin ear and missed opportunities. One passage is a distinct improvement – the sea voyage, with Renfield laughing hysterically out a port ad the vampire goes out to hunt the terrified crew. It's a brief handful of shots, no dialog, and smothered in atmosphere: freakin' terrifying. If only the entire film had been of the same quality.

Alas, it's not, neither in mood nor in brevity. Melford's pace drags on and on, worse as it goes. Again it reminds me to cherish Browning's.

As for the cast, Carlos Villarias (or Villar as he's listed in the credits) is no Lugosi. Hell, he's not much of a Villar either considering he spends much of his screen time trying to be Lugosi and failing badly. The man simply does not have anything like as much presence or charisma. There's no power in his stare or ferocity in his outbursts. Brandish a cross at him and he doesn't know how to play it – we get a silly-looking sour face.

Villarias is often directed to bare his teeth a lot. It's menacing enough despite the obvious lack of fangs, it's what you expect of a vampire (was this the one that started that?) but it made me think about Lugosi...it's often pointed out that Lugosi had no fangs, but in truth Lugosi always keeps his upper teeth hidden. That always bothered me when he goes on for a bite, it looks as if a toothless old bloodsucker is threatening to gum his victims to death. I wonder if it wasn't a canny move after all: we never see that he doesn't have fangs.

By contrast, Pablo Alvarez Rubio wisely refuses to ape Dwight Frye and makes Renfield his own (the best thing in the movie). It's a slightly different take, farther gone but a tad less tormented about it, he's less menacing which may not serve the film well as a horror but it does make him a little more engaging. Certainly more so than the rest of the cast, though. Much of the acting is community stage caliber. Lupita Tovar gives a much more fluid performance than Helen; Chandler, who is rather forced. Eduardo Arozamena makes a solid Van Helsing, not as cold as severe as Edward Van Sloan. No fault of the actor but Van Helsing is a dead ringer for Eugene Levy... Barry Norten makes a much more agreeable Juan Harker than David Manners.

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)

A positive review of a movie should be more than just a laundry list of refutations of other people's criticisms. It should, I think, point out what works about the film. Browning's Dracula is one of those I have trouble writing about because I always end up with the former, while never quite being able to put my finger on the latter. It's a deservedly well-loved movie, and it has just as many detractors as fans. Strangely, it's the critics who best express what they think doesn't work...I'm unsure whether I've ever read a take on it that captures exactly why it does work. Maybe there's nothing exact about it.

In fairness I should start not with the movie itself but by acknowledging the film that should have been. Universal had been planning a more epic and more faithful movie starring Lon Chaney in the title role (I don't know which part of that is the more mouthwatering). It's our great loss that it fell apart. Chaney died and the studio changed hands, and the project was scrapped in favor of a scaled-down production based not on Stoker's book but one of the more popular stage adaptations. Maybe the critics are right when they say Browning lost all enthusiasm. No one really knows what his thoughts were, we're all left guessing.

I grew up on Dracula ('31) and had a child's ability to accept that he was a monster simply because...well, just because. He's well-spoken, well-dressed, exceptionally well-mannered, urbane...the perfect dinner guest provided you're not the dinner. Still, you already know going in that he's a blood-drinking creature that isn't really human and isn't really alive either. It's just one of those things you learn early on, Dracula is a culturally known quantity the world over and you know this before ever seeing one of these movies. Some jaded horror viewers may need something more, but to a kid an undead blood-drinker is a lot. Children have a way of honing in on a concept whether the frills are there or not.

Some of those childhood movies no longer work for me, sad to say. Not so with Browning's Dracula, if anything it's become much more frightening to me in adulthood. When I was a child Dracula himself scared me whenever he was onscreen. Now it's the whole movie that creeps me out. It's no longer just a film about a monster. It's about keeping a death vigil over people you can't save, about watching someone you love fall under the sway of corruption and change into someone who no longer cares about you. The ghoulish factor provided by the literal vampirism completes the chill of nightmarishness, but it isn't the only one.

Nightmarish is exactly the right word. Have you ever tried examining a bad dream upon waking? Not just the content, but the experience of it, the tone and feel. Often the terror one feels comes not from what happens in the dream but from the dread of what you expect to happen. You feel yourself surrounded by mortal danger, impending death, evil, an awareness or knowledge of things not spelled out in the dream but that – in the way of dreams – you just happen to know. Like...that there's a vampire in the house. Notice, also, that bad dreams are often quiet. Your dreams don't have a score.

I don't know what works for others but Dracula evokes exactly that experience for me, due in no small part to the lack of music in the film. The effect is unintended, the choice not to score the film a practical one, but the effect is there all the same. If you're familiar with the dream experience I'm talking about try watching Dracula at one in he morning with the lights out, without the score Phillip Glass wrote for it, and see if it doesn't feel creepily familiar. It's a talky film, too, just like the most excruciating of bad dreams – you drone when you want to scream, shamble when you want to run.

The copy I watched was the 75^th anniversary edition DVD, on my new HDTV. I've never seen it look so good. Karl Freund's cinematography is consistent throughout the production, from the Carpathians in the night fog to the night life of London or the estate of Seward's sanitarium in Whitby. The camerawork is subdued but never static or setbound: simply, it's about the ambiance more than the movement. Friend and the set decorators create a living space with deep blacks, strategic whites, and subtle grays. There's real depth of space onscreen: check out the gorgeous scene of the “mysterious Lady in White” walking through the foliage and other outdoors shots in the films' latter half (no one complains of the opening sequence in Transylvania for good reason) or the textured murk of the dungeons that seem to go on forever. In older copies the interior of Seward's mansion came across as flat, and the scenes duller for it. This restoration was a revelation, now it's a space that's fluid and expansive and enhancing the dream quality: I can feel the other rooms of the house and the potential for unseen that's within them, dark deeds taking place where no one's looking.

Casting Lugosi was a bold move. He had proven popular in the role on stage already, especially with the women, but it's a risky (risque) departure to present a vampire with such undeniable sex appeal. I can't imagine how heady this might have been for Thirties' audiences, with vampirism already tacitly understood to be a sexual transgression but this time involving not a monstrous parody of humanity but a sex symbol that had women swooning. Lugosi was hired for just that appeal. Take note, you who think recent adaptations have erred in casting attractive, romantic leads! His presence is undeniable. His Count has the supreme self-confidence of unquestioned nobility.

Of course, Dwight Frye is the other standout. As Renfield he's a nervous wreck full of rapidly shifting moods, nervous amusement, sudden fits of threatening mania. His terrible sick titter is unforgettable as his mad eyes leer up the hatchway - “Eh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnhhhh-h-h-h-h!” If the rest of the cast lack for excitement, Frye makes up for all of them.

I've grown less fond of Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing over the years (though I love him in Frankenstein and Freund's The Mummy). Stokers' character is marked by a profound compassion for all he encounters, and I don't see that at all in Van Sloan's portrayal. Not does he do a very good job convincing Harker that they face a supernatural being. If you tell people that the man they just met is a vampire and they say there's no such thing, repeating 'but he's undead!' isn't a winning argument. Still, he does exude a steadfast authority – the scene of his confrontation with Dracula is still strong, and it helps that Harker is a dull-witted drip. Helen Chandler as Mina...not my favorite but her face does have a strange allure when she vamps out.

There are nice touches throughout, like the nonchalant way Dracula leaves the dead flowergirl behind, Dracula walking through a web without breaking it, the vampiric bee. Determine the scale of the bee's coffin by the stones on the wall it sits against: that is a human-sized bee, predating Argento's mantis for sheer WTFness. Making a tiny coffin for a bee might be a believable whimsy, but who crafts a scale stone wall to go with it?

I love this movie more than ever. It's far from a nostalgia thing.

Tetsuo: The Iron man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

“The penis is evil.” - Zardoz

When was the last time your city was torn apart by a towering metal cock?

A button-down wage earner and his girlfriend are driving in the city when they hit a man. They then cart him to a field and dump him. Seems the two were having sex while driving, and their hit-&-run arouses them still further until they are having sex at the scene in the full knowledge that their (presumably dying) victim is watching them.

The next morning, salaryman finds his cheek has sprouted a shiny metal zit. Soon he'll be having scary encounters with transformed strangers and having sexually charged nightmares of his girlfriend as a demonic hermaphrodite (or at least sporting a bionic strap-on of more than regular size).

What's going on here?

Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 professional debut is a retelling and expansion of his homemade short Futsu Saizu no kaijin (“Monster of Regular Size”). It's more of a primal scream of suppressed rage and lust than a movie, really. With no budget to speak of, Tsukamoto has drawn on techniques not too removed from early Sam Raimi and applied them to an inspired vision of urban Hell that could the same neighborhood from Eraserhead, with a heavy dose of Cronenberg's body horror, Tetsuo seems to draw influence from manga and the pioneering days of Mtv (think Talking Heads videos). Tetsuo is filmed in stark black and white 16mm, lending a grain to convey the grit and inhuman decay of Tokyo city, and maniacally edited to the point that it's difficult to follow without several viewings. the images are of a world buried in the debris of society, metal refuse of every sort heaped and heaving like a fungus over civilization, nothing natural in sight but for the human body itself. Tetsuo has a sound design that matches its frantic and disjointed look. Feverish in pitch and tone, what not many mention when talking about the movie is that Tetsuo is also wickedly funny. Tsukamoto infuses it with a sick sense of humor from absurdist to slapstick.

So what is really going on? That's up for interpretation. Some see an anti-homosexual plea at work, others see it as pro-gay (Tsukamoto, a humanist with an empathetic bent, is far from the type to deliver a message of intolerance). The director claims that it grew from his love/hate relationship with the city itself, living removed from nature. The facts of the story are that the man hit by the wage earner has a fetish for metal and a sexual appetite for violence. He had already tried to fuse his body with bits of metal inserted under the meat of his limbs. When he sees the driver's lusty response to having hit and nearly killed him, the fetishist sees a kindred spirit and becomes infatuated with the driver. He begins to harass the man through bizarre psychic methods (we see his POV, memories, and messages to the businessman via televisual imagery), an insane courtship aimed at bringing out the salaryman's latent sexual thirst for destruction. The driver's transformation of psyche manifests in the man's biological body becoming more and more am abstract mass of iron. More than that and you're reading what you want into the film. It's highly suggestive but never explicates itself.

Tsukamoto structures his tale around two men and a woman, the same setup he's reused for the bulk of his early screen career with the woman often transformed through her relationships with the men. What I find fascinating in Tetsuo (Is that the name of the fetishist or the salary man? I don't know!) is that the business drone seems to have an ambivalent attitude about sex and possibly women (he flees an encounter with a prim businesswoman in the subway, though admittedly she's pretty damn scary) while the metal fetishist positively identifies with women and female sexuality, choosing to use both the girlfriend and the subway patron as his avatars, and ultimately appearing as an androgynous punk sprite during his final seduction.

Testsuo is not my favorite from Shinya Tsukamoto, but it gets better every time I see it. In fact, the first time left me exhilarated by the ferocity of it but lukewarm to its substance. I've now seen it a number of times, and it...grows on me. Tetsuo would make a great double-feature with Cronenberg's Crash.

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

Ask what people's favorite Dracula film is and among the answers you'll hear “the Lugosi” or ”one of the ones with Christopher Lee” or “that Gary Oldman movie”. No one ever says “the Schreck”. Yes, sure, plenty will name Nosferatu...but never by citing by the actor. People know Lugosi, Lee, and Oldman. They know Langella and Jourdan and Palance. Who the hell is Max Schreck besides an in-joke in a Tim Burton movie? Most people doubt that's even the actor's real name. Of course they do, it means “fright” in German. What could be more perfect for a vampire film?

In fact Schreck was his real name and he left behind a substantial body of work as an actor. I've never seen any of it, and I'll bet most of you never have either. He is indelibly and permanently inscribed in my bad dreams as Count Orlok. I know nothing else of him. Max Schreck doesn't exist in my awareness, say his name and all I can see is the vampire stretching out his talons. For all of Murnau's brilliant experimental cinematography, Schreck remains the movie's most important special effect.

Schreck's Count Orlok looks inhumanly thin like a praying mantis and moves with the slow, deliberate pace and body language of a spider. He gives one the creeps the moment he appears, beckoning his midnight guest into his unlit castle. A sane person would run away screaming. Vampires feed on blood, we know, but this may be the only vampire movie where the act is almost wholly insectile in its parasitism rather than a thin metaphor for lusts. That too makes Orlok stand out from the rest as less human and less alive. He doesn't have the urbanity of the Draculae that followed. Unlike other Draculas his masquerade of humanity isn't just a mask of civility, the way Schreck essays the role Orlok's disguise comes off more like that of an alien wearing a human suit that doesn't fit well. He is altogether other. And like I said, most of us have never seen Schreck in anything else so we have no impression of him as a human with which to strip away the monster.

Nosferatu is always named as one of the great films in German Expressionism, but that's wrong – it's great but not expressionist. Murnau employs various tricks with camera, editing, and lighting only sparingly, and crucially only does so when Orlok is on the screen to heighten the impression that the vampire is so wholly 'other' or unnatural that even the laws of nature cease to function in his presence...that to be in his presence is to abandon the protection of reality itself. Copolla tried to this with his version, unsuccessfully in my opinion because his film was overflowing with so many artistic touches that the ones surrounding Dracula failed to stand out as meaningful.

Everything else about Nosferatu is as firmly realistic as his Tabu, as tactile and earthy. The grisly visage of the dead sea captain conveys a sense of bodily decay that's mirrored in the castle where the vampire keeps his coffin. There's a startling shot of a postman defecating in the bushes* that threw me for a moment, but I think it underscores the natural earthiness the whole film evokes, that life is as vibrant as it is messy and vulnerable. It's in the insects Knock (this movie's Renfield) devours, Hutter's (Harker's) reckless glee for adventure and disregard of danger real or superstitious, Ellen's (Mina's) twee concern over picked flowers. Contrasted to the dreamy unreality of the vampire, this grounding in vibrant realism makes Orlock that much more a threat by emphasizing the richness of the life he threatens. When we first meet Ellen, she looks a bit like death already, rather pale and skeletal. Later she becomes a figure of eroticism with her “lovely neck”, feverish sleep, angsty sleepwalk in her sheer nightdress, and calling out passionately for her Hutter when Hutter is about to be molested by Orlok. One of my favorite quotes regarding Max Schreck's Count Orlok is that “he looks like a penis with teeth”**.

*This shot isn't in most public domain copies, nor in the Blachawk-issued restoration that I own on VHS. I saw it for the first time last night in the restoration put out by Kino. This version also has more accurate intertitles.

**attribution needs a confirmation.