The 1989 Japanese film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (鉄男 Tetsuo) will play at the Row House Cinema from October 13 - 17 as part of its Body Horror series. A 1992 New York Times review shares the story:
Early in Shinya Tsukamoto's film "Tetsuo: The Iron Man," a character identified only as a metals fetishist (Mr. Tsukamoto) scours a junkyard, slices open his thigh and sticks a piece of scrap metal into the wound. Gasping in ecstatic agony, he lurches into the street where he is nearly run over by a car driven by a white-collar worker called the Salaryman (Tomoroh Taguchi).. . .
While shaving the next morning, the Salaryman notices a metal spike growing in one cheek. It is the first sign of his gradual transformation from a human being into a walking metal scrapheap of rusty metal plates, dangling cables and a rotating metal drill that extends from his groin.
"Iron Man" makes little sense as a story, but it is driven by a perverse sense of humor. As the Salaryman's transformation proceeds, it becomes increasingly hard for him to differentiate between his waking state and nightmares in which he is attacked by machinery.Tickets are now available online. The single-screen theater is located at 4115 Butler Street in Lawrenceville (map).
