Pulpmovies Reviews

Tetsuo is an amazing film and one of the best I’ve seen - if not the best. Right from the horrifyingly visceral opening sequence - which starts with a metal fetishist forcing an iron bar into his leg, and ends with him running into the path of an oncoming car - Tetsuo beats you around the head with imagery, ideas and sensations.

Tetsuo works on several levels. At its simplest (although nothing in this film can really be described as simple), it’s a revenge driven horror/thriller in which the metal fetishist returns to torment the driver who ran him over and whose behaviour following the accident (shown in flashbacks via a TV screen) is odd, to say the least.

On top of this, both the fetishist and the driver have become infected by metal. This infection is dehumanising for both men (a process which is underlined by not naming any of the characters in the film) not only physically, but also psychologically. However, the way they are affected is initially very different with the driver, who tries to resist the infection quickly becoming a mass of wires, solder and steel. The, clearly insane, fetishist embraces the infection - in fact it isn’t clear (to me, at least) whether he was killed in the car accident and revived by the metal or whether he survived - and, initially, appears to be not only in control of his own infection but also that of the driver.

The pacing of this film is incredible. The plot rushes forward, bombarding you with events and scenes so rapidly that you really do need to watch it twice just to get a handle on what exactly is going on. This, combined with the immense amount of stop-motion animation used throughout, gives the film a very surreal feel - probably the closest anyone is going to get to a live action anime.

The main themes of this film explore the encroachment of industrialisation on nature and the dehumanising effect of becoming over-reliant on technology. These are complex issues and well handled not spoon-feeding the audience but simply battering you with a plot in which these ideas are integral, necessary and assumed. There is no pause to explain any of this, it’s simply left to sink in after the film has finished. This approach makes Tetsuo a very thoughtful film, but only to an audience that is willing to think about it.

Tetsuo is much more than just a film. It’s an experience akin to taking a vertical rollercoaster ride straight down. It’s also and experience that shouldn’t be missed.

This is a great film that combines themes of love, loyalty, honour and revenge into a darkly comic road movie that grips your attention from the start and doesn’t let go until the final scene.

Rosie Perez plays the dangerously sexy Perdita Durango, a woman still haunted by the shooting of her family when she was young. She meets Santeria priest and all round criminal, Romeo Dolorossa (Bardem, playing a character who manages to combine graverober, bankrobber, gunrunner and drugrunner before the film has started!). Together, they cross the US/Mexican border. Although considering Dolorossa’s Santeria beliefs to be nonsense, Durango is turned on by watching a ritual and convinces Dolorossa to go further.

Durango and Dolorossa procede to embark on an increasingly violent cross-border crime spree while events and characters around them steadily close in, building to an inevitable but well executed climax.

In some ways Perdita Durango tries to follow the same themes of honour and vengeance that are familliar from the Heroic Bloodshed films that Kong Kong directors John Woo and Ringo Lam are so good at. Dolorossa, especially, has a clear if perverse sense of honour and turns quickly to violence and murder to defend it. Where the film differs, however, is in the way that Dolorossa is generally not the person seeking revenge, but the villain against whom revenge is sought - sometimes through his own actions, at other times because of events of which he is unaware.

Also, the supporting cast are superb. The two-dimensional teenagers, Duane and Estelle who become victims of Durango and Dolorossa suffer a barrage of violence and abuse, but because their characters are stereotyped to the point of not being particuarly believable, this abuse can be and often is played for laughs. The accident-prone survivor of a DEA agent, Woody Dumas (Gandolfini) receives a battering that is normally not seen outside of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. And his mechanically dull partner Doyle (Cox) is a joy to watch.

On the face of it, this film has no likeable characters and a black humour that is often sick. But Durango and Dolorossa are treated sympathetically and their characters do develop as the film progresses. You do find yourself caring what happens and, at the end of the day, that’s what matters. Watch this film with an open mind, you won’t regret it.

With A Chinese Ghost Story, director Ching Siu-Tung both popularised and gave a name to the genre of frenetic, chop socky laden romantic ghost stories which were coming out of Hong Kong in the 1980’s. In this third outing, however, it’s all starting to look a bit repetitive.

The film opens with a quick pre-credits recap of what happened in A Chinese Ghost Story and then jumps forward 100 years to find another Buddhist monk travelling through the area with his inept student, Fong (Tony Leung). They come to an unnamed town in which a Ghost Festival is being celebrated and find the place full of shifty, dishonest and downright dangerous characters all there for a weapons market.

After a couple of scrapes, the pair decide to spend the night in a haunted temple on the basis that, as Buddhists they’ll be safe from the ghosts and no-one else will dare enter.

The story then follows a very familliar course of monk meets ghost, monk and ghost fall in love, etc., etc. And more than anything else, this is what lets the film down… There really aren’t any surprises and, watching it, you can easily see what is going to happen next… In short, it’s all a bit too formulaic.

That said, it’s not a bad film. Some of the jokes work pretty well, especially the ones involving the money obsessed warrior Yin (Jacky Cheung). Also, the relationship between Fong and Lotus (Joey Wang) is both highly charged and effective. The supernatural effects are pretty good in places, but again, there’s nothing here that I haven’t seen in other Chinese Ghost Stories.

In short, if you’ve never seen a film of this type before, you could do a lot worse than renting A Chinese Ghost Story III. But there are a lot of much beter films that this genre has to offer.