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Tsukamoto Shinya (塚本晋也) is a
Japanese
film director and
actor with a considerable cult following both inside and outside that
country. He has been compared to
David Lynch for his wild,
sf-inflected imagination, his sense of the grotesque and absurd, and
also for his striking images. Many of his movies also revolve around a
common theme: two men in competition for a woman.
His first films, A Phantom of Regular Size / Futsu saizu no kaijin
and The Adventures of Denchu Kozo / Denchu Kozo no boken made in
1986/87, were short subject
fantasy films shot in
16mm
black and white. In both films he made aggressive use of jarring
editing,
stop-motion animation, bizarre sound effects, and grotesque or
outlandish subject matter. Denchu Kozo concerned itself with an
unhappy young boy with an antenna growing out of his back, who is somehow
sucked into a netherworld and must do battle with an enemy
vampire trying to destroy sunlight.
His third film Tetsuo: The Ironman, made in 1988 and shot in
the same low-budget,
underground-production style as his previous films, established him
internationally and created his worldwide cult. This extremely graphic but
also strikingly-filmed fantasy opens with a man (called only "the man", or
sometimes the "Metals
Fetishist") tearing open a massive gash in his leg and shoving in a
piece of scrap metal. Upon seeing maggots festering in the wound, he
screams, runs out into the street, and is hit by a car. The driver of the
car (cult actor
Taguchi Tomoroh) tries to cover up the mess by dumping the body into a
ravine, but the dead man comes back to haunt him -- by forcing his body to
gradually metamorphose into a walking pile of scrap metal. In one of the
film's most controversial sequences, the man discovers his penis has
mutated into a gargantuan power drill, and winds up murdering his
girlfriend with it.
Tsukamoto's next film, Hiruko the Goblin, was a more
conventional
horror film, about demons being unleashed from the gates of hell. He
then created a
sequel to Tetsuo, named Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer, which
revisited many of the same ideas as the first movie but with a bigger
budget and in 35mm wide-gauge color. In Body Hammer, a
salaryman's son is kidnapped by a group of
skinhead thugs, who then force the man's nascent rage to make him
mutate into a gigantic human weapon. The film diverges from the original
in a number of ways, not the least of which being that it tries to supply
coherent motives for everyone involved. Many critics cited this as a
weakness, since the dreamy incoherence of the first film was one of its
strongest assets.
Tokyo Fist (1995) again dealt with the idea of rage as a
transformative force (similar to
David Cronenberg's
The Brood). Here, a meek insurance salesman discovers that an old
friend of his, now a semi-professional
boxer, may be having an affair with his fiancιe. The salesman then
enters into a rigorous and self-destructive boxing training program to get
even. Here, Tsukamoto showed he was not simply interested in wild,
outlandish fantasy, but in blunt realism as well.
Bullet Ballet (1998) drifted even further from fantasy and
science fiction, and more into a sort of
film noir territory. A man (Tsukamoto himself) discovers that his
longtime girlfriend committed suicide with a gun, and becomes obsessed
with getting a gun just like that one. His singleminded behavior causes
him to run afoul of a gang of thugs, especially when he evinces interest
in the young girl who is one of their compatriots. Many critics complained
the second half of the film lost the direction and momentum of the first
half, but it was clear that Tsukamoto was trying to take more risks with
his ideas than before.
Gemini (1999) was a lush and disturbing adaptation of an
Edogawa Rampo story, in which a country doctor with pretensions of
superiority has his life torn apart when another man who appears to be his
exact duplicate enters his life. Things are complicated further by the
twin taking control of his wife, an amnesiac with a criminal background.
Many hailed it as being Tsukamoto's best film ever and it certainly
compares favorably to Tetsuo in terms of both story, visuals and
execution.
A Snake of June (2002) once again found Tsukamoto employing
the formula of two men in competition for one woman, as a young lady is
blackmailed into perverse sexual behavior against her husband's will --
until her husband finds that he enjoys the blackmail more than the
blackmailer does.
Tsukamoto has appeared in many other director's films as well, such as
Takashi Miike's
Ichi the Killer and
Dead or Alive 2.
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