Tetsuo II: Body Hammer
Dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992
82 min
With Tomorowo Taguchi and Shinya Tsukamoto
In Japanese, with English subtitles

“I don’t know what I am,” cries a Japanese salaryman, whose rage at his son’s kidnapping by violent thugs transforms his body into a living machine. In the big-budget follow-up to his cult classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto continues his surrealist exploration of the blurring of technology and the human body in a postindustrial world. Hailed as a strikingly original masterpiece, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer uses subversive and hallucinatory imagery to vividly capture the waves of technological fear coursing throughout Japanese science fiction in the second half of the twentieth century.