There’s been a long and storied history of young, visionary directors who chose to semi-remake their rough-looking, low budget debuts with more cash and experience and pass it off as a sequel. In 1992, Shinya Tsukamoto, creator of the frenetic, art-house, cyber-punk, freak out, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, did just that with Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, a follow-up that reworked his themes of industrial body horror into something approaching a film with a conventional plot. However, to add a little more bang for our buck, Body Hammer was not only longer and actually featured a cast larger than two people, but we were now granted the pleasure of seeing Tsukamoto’s clanking creations in full colour as he churned out yet more of his nightmarish visions.
So join me now as we enter a screeching, sweaty world of hyper body modification, mind control and more fleshy firearns than a day spent watching Videodrome over and over again.
Buttoned down specs wearer, Taniguchi Tomoo lives a typically vanilla lifestyle with his wife, Kana and his chubby-cheeked son, Minori, but he’s often disturbed by the fact that he has no memories of his life before his adoption at 8 years-old. While no one thinks to tell him that having no memories before that age is perfectly normal, it continues to be the only black matk on his life until the henchmen of mysterious Yatsu stride into his life and try to kidnap his son. In the melee, Taniguchi retrieves his boy, but is injected in the chest with a strange gun and subsequently finds that he has greater strength than he’s ever had before.
He’ll have ample chance to prove it too as Yatsu’s henchmen are firm believers in “at first you don’t succeed – try, try again” and take another swing at kidnapping Minori and Taniguchi is so angered he undergoes a bizarre transformation that sees his arm and chest turn into grotesque, fleshy guns that unleashes an unrestrained fusilade that obliterates his nipper completely.
From here, things go predictably unpredictable as we discover that Yatsu is planning to turn his cult of body-obsessed skinheads into biomechanical gods and is using Taniguchi’s rage fuel transformation as a test run, abducting him and fucking with his mind even further by bolting him snugly into a primitive VR unit. However, something is going on with Taniguchi that not even the mutant Yatsu has counted on and the metalic mutation that coursing through the man’s body is something that’s existed in his genes far longer that that injection he recently received.
While Taniguchi eventually transforms entirely into a brutish, iron giant, the only way Yatsu can halt his monstrous experiment is to infect him with a gun that’ll make him rust away, but even after all the trauma she’s witnessed, Kama still chooses to stand by her man – even though describing him as a man these days is a bit of a stretch.
Essentially sharing a lot of details from his earlier venture into psycho-sexual, cyborg shenanigans, Tetsuo II is yet another truly brain-frying example of style over substance that continues to fuck with the human firm like a child playing with silly putty. The slightly more generous run time allows a small amount of normality to intrude on our leads before people start sprouting weird-ass appendages and running around an oddly deserted city in order to settle insane scores. However, as maniacal as it is, Body Hammer strangely suffers from something that any other movie would consider a virtue: coherence.
The original Tetsuo buried its story of duelling mutants in a something akin to nightmarish, hallucinogenic sixty minute music video that didn’t really give much of a damn if you followed its plot, Body Hammer, however is, for the most part, a far more linear beast and feels like the type of far more relatable kind of left-field adventure you’d get in many Anime movies at the time.
The main cast is practically identical to the first with Tomorowo Taguchi returning to play yet another bespectacled everyman who about to suffer a change way more disruptive than a mid-life crisis, while Shinya Tsukamoto himself once again casts himself as a variant of the metal fetishist with a god complex he portrayed back in ’89. Rounding out the reunion is Nobu Kanaoka, who played the nightmarish Woman With Glasses in the first film, but gets a slightly less labour intensive role here as Taniguchi’s constantly horrified wife, Kana.
From there it’s just the same story as the first but placed on a far grander scale. Yatsu still wants to corrupt his unwitting victim in the ways of metallic mutation, but now he has an entire cult if muscular skinheads behind him who spend every waking hour honing their bodies to absolute perfection. These scenes, lit with an orange glow of a industrial foundry that sees these oily, hairless, fanatics relentlessly pumping iron, are not only striking, but when they wear their diving bell-style armour, they look like a promo ad for a cenobite-themed workout video. Elsewhere, the moment where Taniguchi is bolted into an infernal VR unit and sprouts a virtual armoury from his rib cage is the exact moment where Cronenberg collides with The Matrix – which is all the more impressive when you figure that The Matrix wouldn’t be made for another seven years.
However, despite a wonderfully exaggerated world that sees exploded toddlers, the lead transforming into a massive girder-man with an anvil shaped head and an infected Yatsu vomiting piles of rust, Tsukamoto’s reach goes far beyond his means. While I wouldn’t usually penalise a low budget movie for having restricted means (Body Hammer’s budget probably was barely enough to cover Teminator 2’s sunglasses allowance), the final battle suffers from some ropey stop motion that makes some of the action moments look distractingly cheap in this slightly larger production.
However, the real issue with this sequel is that while Tsukamoto is exploring more themes such as exercise fanatics actively looking to improve beyond their body’s limits, for the most part, Tsukamoto is merely content to simply retrace his steps leading to a denouement that’s virtually identical to the first film. Also, the fact that the sequel is noticably less sexually perverse (no gigantic, drill-bit shlong here, people) means that Body Hammer actually feels far less dangerous and wild than it’s anything goes predecessor.
Still definately worth checking out if your partial to a spot of body horror or extreme asian cinema, Body Hammer is nevertheless one sequel that doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head.
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