Audio Assault.
June proved to be a wild month: we talked about the wacky space antics of Leprechaun 4: In Space (listen), the underseen-but-very-good trans vampire film Bit (listen), and Robert Rodriguez’s first half of the Grindhouse double-bill, Planet Terror (listen).
To kick off July, we’re racing over to Japan to discuss the 35th anniversary of Shinya Tsukamoto‘s Japanese cyberpunk masterpiece, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).
In the extreme cinema film, an unnamed salary man (Tomorowo Taguchi) is slowly transformed into metal after a hit and run involving a metal fetishist (Tsukamoto). After accidentally (?) killing first his cat, and then his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) – with his new metal drill dick no less – the salary man and the fetishist engage in a destructive battle of wills that only ends when they fuse together. Together at least, the lovers set out to destroy the world.
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Episode 289 – Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Strap in for an aural assault because we’re checking out Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) for its 35th anniversary.
This 67 minute black and white, nearly dialogue-free film is a wild and intense experience. It’s also surprisingly queer! From a sexually dissatisfied hetero couple to men checking each other out during sex to M/M assimilation to jizzy fluids, it’s not a reach to say the salary man and the metal fetishist are into each other.
And that’s without even getting into the metal dick drill of it all!
Cross out Tetsuo: The Iron Man!
Coming up on Wednesday: We’re celebrating Christmas in July with a look at Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s chilly sexual odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 317 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Hannibal S01E07, A Quiet Place: Day One, MaXXXine and Longlegs. And to tie in with Longlegs, our audio commentary for the month will be on David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en.