Blu-ray review – Solid Metal Nightmares – The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto

Posted on by skizzfan42@gmail.com

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto

Minutes: 754

Year: 2020

Hello friends, long time readers will know that in this section, above the copy from a reputable outlet, I tend to write something a bit quippy, laden with sometimes non-sensical comments with tangential relation to the movie you are about to espouse. Regretfully I cannot. I am still recovering from my experience of watching the films in the Arrow Films box set, SOLID METAL NIGHTMARES: THE FILMS OF SHINYA TSUKAMOTO.

From DiabolikDVD.com:

One of the most distinctive and celebrated names in modern Japanese cinema, there’s no other filmmaker quite like Shinya Tsukamoto. Since his early days as a teenager making Super 8 shorts, he has remained steadfastly independent, garnering widespread acclaim while honing his own unique and instantly recognizable aesthetic on the margins of the industry. Frequently exploring themes of urban alienation, physical transformation and psychosexual obsession, his films cross genre boundaries, defying straightforward classification. This exclusive collection gathers together eight feature-length films and two shorts from Tsukamoto’s diverse filmography, including his most recent offering – his samurai drama Killing, making its home video premiere.

Includes:

Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Tokyo Fist, Bullet Ballet, A Snake of June, Vital, Kotoko, Killing, The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo, Haze

My first experience with Tsukamoto was earlier this year when Elric Kane mentioned A SNAKE OF JUNE in an episode of Pure Cinema Podcast. It would be nice to say I am a lifelong fan, but I am occasionally slow on the uptick. At the time A SNAKE OF JUNE was only available on DVD from Tartan Extreme. So, I got it, watched it, and it changed me. However, as is typical of your humble author, shortly after I purchased a DVD a glorious Blu-ray is announced.

The good news was that I wasn’t going to have to wait too long to watch more of Tsukamoto’s films, the bad news is that I had yet another old DVD that might get me in trouble for buying a second. With luck, though, our friends at Arrow Video decided to package SNAKE with 9 other films by Tsukamoto, some of which edited my film DNA, and obliterated my soul.

As film writers we are often want for hyperbole. My soul is okay, perhaps a touch bleaker than it was before, but it’s still there. I watched TETSUO: IRON MAN and TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER on the day the box arrived. If you are familiar with the music videos of Nine Inch Nails or Tool, then you are slightly ready for TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. What you get is a loud cacophony of industrial music accompanying a collage of stigmatophic and piqueristic images that will certainly turn any available stomach queasy. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of a family gathering assuming that this has any relation to the Marvel character. A lifetime of watching grotesque horror films has prepared me to only have minor squirms at a few clips. TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER plays on many of the themes of THE IRON MAN while diverging wherever the sudden budget would allow.

With THE IRON MAN Tsukamoto was  instrumental in re-invigorating Japanese horror from nuclear terrors to the more extreme features like AUDITION and THE RING. These two films, by Tsukamoto aren’t too much my taste, but being able to retroactively see some subversive films that are clearly inspired by David Lynch and David Cronenberg and somehow manage to be a separate amalgam of the two directors visions is a feeling that is few and far between when it comes to home video collecting. And, this is just the beginning.

What if I told you that the two of the more popular films in this box set hardly compare to most of the rest, would you believe me? Six of the eight films, after those firs two, are all progressively more interesting. This is a trend that should be expected of any career, but all too often the first few stand high above the rest. I can’t say that I really enjoyed THE ADVENTURE OF DENCH-KOZO, which was a very early film, and KILLING felt a little distant.

You can read how I feel about A SNAKE OF JUNE here, so I won’t bother repeating myself. The remaining five make me hesitate to say much because each on has a scene or two that my heart figuratively stopped beating and I literally felt life drain from me. It was the feeling of my lungs emptying leaving me gasping for air while simultaneously forgetting how to breath. Especially KOTOKO, VITAL, and HAZE.

Disc two has TOKYO FIST and BULLET BALLET. The former is about a work-a-day socially invisible man, Tsuda, who is humiliated by an old friend, Kojima. This leads Tsuda to study boxing to fulfil a mid-life crisis of confidence. It is a bizarre bridge between the two TETSUO films and his later work. BULLET BALLET, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of melancholy as we follow Goda in his descent into the seedy Japanese underground in search of a gun for, let’s say, personal reasons. This film feels like a realistic version of AKIRA with lighting that lifts every drop of water off the film. It is unrelenting and will leave you ragged.

One of the discs has the violent period piece, KILLING, which was fine, but fells bland after watching KOTOKO. KOTOKO, on the other hand was a tour de force of about mental health and the affects post-partum depression can have on a single parent. The film is like a surrealistic Jackson Pollack of emotion and melodramatic acting; sometimes it comes out of nowhere, but it always splatters in a seemingly random pattern culminating in a baseball bat of a scene into that will knock the air out of you.

Disc three leads with A SNAKE OF JUNE and follows it up with VITAL and HAZE. In VITAL could be compared with MULHULLAND DR with medical school rather than acting. Hiroshi, the main character, wakes in a hospital healing from a car accident that killed his girlfriend and took his memory. As he pieces his life back together, he realizes that he was in medical school. It should be unlawful to say more, but it caught me off guard and crying. Next is HAZE with is a brisk 45 minutes of torture as a man wakes in a confined space and he goes through a gruesome maze with hopes of freedom. HAZE was the last one I had watched and has left me in an inescapable rut.

Overall Solid Metal Nightmares – The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto seems like more of a package of clips that the doctors in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE would have used to mentally castrate Alex. It could be a series of films you might give an enemy so they might become afraid of your mental instability. But, it is also a collection of some of the most authentic, thought provoking, subversive, and horrific films that you can find (which are not also in Swedish, let’s be honest, these adjectives should easily identify a recent Bergman collection). These probably aren’t films that you are going to want to watch over and over again because they suck the life out of you, but if you have an itch to for the darker sort of company that most humans or animals cannot provide then Solid Metal Nightmares just might be that friend you need.

To be clear, for me this set is one of the few absolute shoe-ins for top fifteen releases of the year and will be in contention for the top spot.

While most sets from Arrow sell out too quickly this one is criminally still available and, if you have read this far without blocking my site in your firewall, then you are probably going to want to head over to DiabolikDVD and snag it while you can.

Special Features:

  • High Definition Blu-ray™ (1080p) presentations of all ten films
  • Original lossless PCM 1.0 mono audio on Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer and Tokyo Fist
  • Original lossless PCM 2.0 stereo audio on Bullet Ballet and Haze
  • Original lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 on A Snake of June, Vital, Kotoko and Killing
  • Optional lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 on Bullet Ballet
  • Optional English subtitles for all films
  • Audio commentaries by Japanese cinema expert Tom Mes on all ten films, including brand new commentaries on Tetsuo, Tetsuo II, Tokyo Fist, A Snake of June, Kotoko, Killing, The Adventure of Denchu-kozo and Haze
  • Brand new career-spanning interview with Shinya Tsukamoto
  • An Assault on the Senses, a brand new visual essay on the films and style of Shinya Tsukamoto by Japanese cinema expert Jasper Sharp
  • Multiple archival interviews with Shinya Tsukamoto, covering every film in the collection
  • Shooting A Snake of June, an archival behind-the-scenes featurette on the film’s production
  • Archival The Making of Vital featurette
  • Archival behind-the-scenes featurette on Vital’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival
  • Archival featurette on Vital’s special effects
  • The Making of Haze, an archival behind-the-scenes featurette on the film’s production
  • Kaori Fuji at the Locarno Film Festival, an archival featurette focusing on Haze’s lead actress
  • Archival Background to The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo featurette
  • Tokyo Fist, Bullet Ballet and Vital music clips
  • Multiple trailers and image galleries
  • Limited edition packaging featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx, Gary Pullin, Ian MacEwan, Chris Malbon, Jacob Phillips, Tommy Pocket, Peter Strain and Tony Stella
  • Double-sided fold-out poster
  • Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the films by Kat Ellinger, Jasper Sharp and Mark Schilling”