Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

The original 'Tetsuo' knocked me out with its inventiveness and disturbing originality. This sequel/remake/cash-in (whatever you want to call it) bored me witless. The budget is obviously increased, the ideas and confrontation decreased. 'Tetsuo' is a much more difficult movie to watch/understand but it is worth it. 'Tetsuo II' is way to conventional, with a "plot" and "characters", and loses the unique vision and mystery of the original. What you end up with is a dumb ass action movie - the complete antithesis of 'Tetsuo'. Avoid this, watch the first movie instead.

The bad things here: repetitive music, shaky cam, most of the action takes place in scenes where the light is obscured a lot. There is only one sound for the protagonist.

The good stuff: manic overacting, great VFX, Shinya Tsukamoto as the main villain, insane sweaty buff monks. Lots of body horror albeit a bit light.

A brilliant re-imagining of Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 cult classic now with more story, more special effect and a bigger budget. Body Hammer is my favorite movie in the tetsuo series because it's expanded more with the story while keeping the storyline same and doing something new.

The effects are unique and uniquely unreal, as they were in the original. This is one filmmaker's nightmares rendered real. These two films, along with Lynch's Eraserhead, are the real deal. The cutting is fast so as to cause many (already extreme) shots to register on the subconscious more than the seeing eye. It will haunt you.

This is truly a worthy sequel that is a worth to watch.

I will rate this movie: highly watch this movie out of 10.

Whereas the first Tetsuo was a sweaty, psycho-sexual fever dream, Body Hammer feels like an attempt to make things more approachable. There's more of an over-arching plot, there's a (very) bare bones attempt at explaining why the things on the screen are happening, and the movie is in color with a much larger cast. Don't get me wrong, if the first movie didn't exist, this would still stand out as a bizarre a surreal film. There's some of the same impressive stop motion (though much less than the first film), a young child dies violently 20 minutes in, and the overall tone is a confusion of dark and distressing events. That being said, the first film revels in dragging the audience through a non-stop barrage of inscrutable set pieces on its spiral into fetishistic destruction. Body Hammer on the other hand, has some sequences that feel right out of a tokusatsu movie, with people in giant metal muffins and rubber suits shooting gun arms at each other. The first movie doesn't give you a chance to think about anything except for what's happening on the screen in the moment. Body Hammer has enough down time that the plot holes start to stack up. An entire group of characters just inexplicably disappear for the second third of the movie. In the end, is Body Hammer a remake? Is it a sequel? I think it's more of just another stab at a similar idea using some of the same cast. Worth a watch, but firmly in the shadow of its predecessor.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer is Tsukamoto's Evil Dead II, a sequel that reworks the original with more technical polish on a larger budget. There's a big thematic shift from the erotic to the militaristic, with a greater focus on biogenetic weaponry, one that's far less frantic, instead focusing on developing its characters and providing them with a narrative to inhabit. The production values are much higher than that of its predecessor with Tsukamoto's head-spinning experimentation still on full display, the move away from monochrome allowing him to add strong colour filtration to a heady visual brew of crazy editing and bizarre cinematography. Shinya Tsukamoto is a man who knows what he's doing at this point. Ultimately while Tetsuo II: Body Hammer may lack the more disturbing elements of the original, the eccentricities are still here; filled with some excellent sequences and something to say about industrialisation while incorporating some top-notch effects work, leaving it as a very solid piece of filmmaking and a prime example of confrontational underground Japanese Cyperpunk cinema.