REVIEW: TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN

That's a shame.  A more traditional take on the material could really work.  Fucked up and weird is, ironically, pretty old hat.

I have to confess that I've never found the Tetsuo films much to my liking. I could never make a connection either intellectually or viscerally. I've always found them too masturbatory in their weirdness, I guess. And whatever positives I found in The Iron Man only diminished in The Body Hammer. So I'll give this a pass.

I saw Tetsuo: The Iron Man recently and thought it was absolutely amazing, but everything I hear about the follow-ups makes them sound fairly middling so I'm setting my expectations appropriately at mid-level. Being in color and having a budget might have actually ruined the magic of Tetsuo, so, we'll see. Still, I'm looking forward to checking out them and the rest of Tsukamoto's catalogue.

I think it's the weakest of the three, but I still had a good time with it. The mythologizing is probably a misstep and it vaguely cheapens the series (I like the wacky second one, which seems more industrial and based in intentional body modification), but the effects were great and the final action sequence is just a total assault on the senses. I mean, it's a sliding scale from the first (the acting in this one is fairly questionable), but if you liked the first two, I don't know if you could be THAT against this third one.

I loved the Tetsuo series. I saw The Bullet Man first and I couldn’t even blink. I probably have a very positive opinion of the third film because it was the first from the series that I saw, so I wasn't expecting anything from it. Then I saw the first and second films back to back and loved them.

To me, the first was purely experimental, the second was like an experimental/80s action/sci fi hybrid, and the third was cyberpunk. I like how the protagonists from each film are essentially the same but they all end up making very different choices.