Tetsuo: The Iron Man / YMMV

Audience-Alienating Premise: Obviously, given the movie's subject material. While the movie has become a Cult Classic, the cyberpunk and sheer Nightmare Fuel of it makes it unable to find much of an audience beyond that.
Awesome Music:
- The third movie has a song from Nine Inch Nails over the ending credits. It is glorious. Director Tsukamoto stated that working with Trent Reznor made a dream come true for him. Considering "TD" from The Iron Man has a pretty similar guitar riff to NIN's song "Sin", the fit was indeed a natural one.
- "Megatron" by Chu Ishikawa plays over the ending credits of the first movie. It is glorious.
  - And terrifying. Though technically "Megatron" itself is never played during the whole film. The track at the end is a remix called "MG" (the difference being that "MG" has a more cacophonous and clanging sound to it). It is, however, still glorious.
  - A less remembered track is "TD", the opening theme. Perfect way to set the mood for the film.
Complete Monster:
- Yatsu, aka the Metal Fetishist, started off as an unremarkable homeless man who was ran over by the Salaryman and his girlfriend. After gaining the power to control metal, Yatsu gets his revenge by transforming the Salaryman into a metal abomination who he became obsessed with due to his sexual fetish for metal. When the Salaryman accidentally kills his girlfriend, Yatsu merges with him so that their "love" could destroy the world. In Body Hammer, where Yatsu is now the younger brother of the Salaryman, Yatsu forms a cult that worships metal, murders a random man to show off his powers, and kills a scientist once he is done working with him. After merging with his brother again, Yatsu assimilates the cult into himself. In The Bullet Man, Yatsu sets his eyes on a half-android named Anthony, planning on using him as a weapon to kill himself and then leave Anthony to annihilate everything else. After killing Anthony's son as the first step to turn him into a monster, Yatsu massacres a SWAT team and assassinates his father, tricking him with a bomb that would supposedly detonate his wife and his unborn child to force him into blasting Tokyo to the ground.
- Tetsuo II: Body Hammer: Tomoo and Yatsu's father, possessing metal-controlling abilities himself, was the madman responsible for their transformations. Demonstrating his powers by painfully fusing a cat with a tea kettle, the father experimented on his own children to turn them into lethal cyborgs. Obsessed with creating the perfect Human Weapon, he had his sons test their powers on animals, expressing twisted pride when Yatsu killed a dog. When his wife was horrified by her husband's actions, the father gleefully raped her at gunpoint while bragging about his achievements, an act that drove Tomoo to slaughter both parents and inspired the younger Yatsu with a love of destruction. His depravity lived on in his sons, who eventually fully transform into the devastating killing machine their father was trying to mold them into.
Epileptic Trees: The first movie was so surreal that it invites all kinds of interpretations.
- There's an interpretation that it represents repressed homosexuality due to the phallic symbols and the embrace between the Salaryman and the Metal Fetishist.
First Installment Wins: The two sequels, though enjoyable films in their own right, are often said to fail to live up to the sheer intensity and mad brilliance of the original.
Funny Moments:
- In the first film, during her pursuit of the Salaryman, the metal-possessed drone-lady briefly stops to...adjust her make-up in a handheld mirror. Complete with mutant metal claw. Yes, it's that type of movie.
- In Body Hammer, Tomoo crawls up a window like a spider while pursuing the skinheads. He skitters past a man drinking his coffee, who immediately does a spit take upon seeing him.
- In The Bullet Man, during Anthony's rampage, a guy (who also happens to be played by Tomorowo Taniguchi), spots him while brushing his teeth. You can almost HEAR the mental "What".
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: For the most part The Iron Man remains a Cult Classic, it won "Best Film" in an International film festival that was held in Italy despite the fact that the dialogue was left untranslated. This was significant because Tsukamoto had a difficult time getting it screened in his home country of Japan until later after it won the award.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- A virus that turns people into living, biomechanical weapons. Now where have we heard of that before? And where did it pop out again few years later?
- The Homoerotic Subtext in the first movie is hilarious given that in Body Hammer, the protagonists, played by the same actors, are actually brothers.
Ho Yay: Between the Salaryman and the Fetishist, of course.
Narm:
- As disturbing and nightmarish as the film is, Tomorowo Taguchi's over the top facial expressions and screaming lessen the horror. Fortunately, the sequel, which has his character transform at will, doesn't have this problem, replacing the gurning with an eerie Slasher Smile.
- The Bullet Man's acting and dialogue can get cheesy at times. Not to mention its intro. Eric Bossick's fluid movements, grunting, and him clutching his stomach makes it look like he's dancing and being struck by diarrhea rather than being "possessed".
- If not meant to be darkly comedic, Anthony's fight against the SWAT team comes across as rather Narm-y as it looks more like a man in an unfinished Iron Man costume stumbling around and fighting a group of airsoft players in the least efficient ways possible rather than a rage-driven transformed human weapon taking out a special forces unit.
  Dr. Ride: Anthony, your body... is a weapon.
Retroactive Recognition: Shinya Tsukamoto provided the voice work for Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He was Hideo Kojima's first choice of Vamp for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty but was unavailable at the time.
Tear Jerker:
- When the Salaryman starts mutating in front of his girlfriend. He begs her to stay away and she's clearly terrified, but she loves him too much to abandon him. And this eventually gets her killed.
- During the final battle, the Metal Fetishist has a flashback from the POV of his childhood, where he was savagely beaten by a cruel man with a metal pipe, presumably lodging it in his skull and turning him into the maniac he is today. The terrified screams of both his adult and child selves overlapping might evoke pity for this psychopath, even if only momentarily.
- Body Hammer start's Tomoo's ordeal with him being tricked into murdering his little son by the thugs pursuing him. Tomoo and Kana's lives fall apart and as Tomoo begs Kana to save him from his metal condition, he sees his late son's toys. Both parents collapse into inconsolable sobbing. Even worse, Tomoo is later made to relive the horrid memory by Yatsu and his minions manipulating his mind.
- And just when you think this film can't get more messed up, we get Tomoo and Yatsu's childhood flashback. Their seemingly kind father was actually a twisted Mad Scientist who fused his own children with guns and trained them to kill and destroy as unfeeling weapons. He then raped their mother when she discovered this, causing the young Tomoo to shoot his parents to death and repress the trauma. Even Yatsu, the Metal Fetishist himself makes it clear how deeply scarred he's been by his past. His narration at the end of the haunting memory even sounds like in some way, he wanted to connect with his brother the only way he knew how. It's horrifying and gut-wrenching to see a family irredeemably warped by a father's abuse.
  Yatsu: After that, my brother lost his memory. Was it sadness at losing our mother? I don't think he felt sorry he'd killed our parents. He felt...the beauty in destruction. That scared him and he lost his memory. I understand that better than anyone. The strength of his will to kill always beat mine. My only weapon is my arm. You feel the beauty of destruction. So go ahead, destroy. Destroy the greatest thing of all.
- Similar to in The Iron Man, Tomoo's wife is unable to bring herself to kill him. She rides along with him, dissociating from her reality while her abomination of a husband lays waste to Tokyo.
Visual Effects of Awesome: For a low-budget, grungy-looking film, the effects are pretty impressive. The Salaryman's fully mutated form looks honestly disturbing and like how someone with metal sprouting out of them would look. Also, the chase scenes with the time-lapse effect are impressive to behold. The sequels have even better effects.
The Woobie: Anthony from The Bullet Man. Unlike the protagonists of the first two films, he didn't do any sort of horrible wrongdoing in the past, which makes his pain more undeserved.

YMMV / Tetsuo: The Iron Man

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