Institute History
Description
A metals fetishist, injured in a motor accident, uses pieces of metal to reconstruct his body. Meanwhile the salary man who was driving the car wakes to find that something is not quite right: there is a small metal thorn sticking out of his cheek. That night he dreams of being raped by a metal phallus—a dream of pain and ecstasy. The salary man's body begins to mutate faster. He thinks it must he some kind of punishment. His terrified girlfriend begins to lose her mind. When he tries to make love to her, they achieve a mutilated ecstasy. The fetishist telepathically implants his vision in the mind of the salary man: a vision of a new world controlled by metals. A psychic chase begins.
Comment: As the title suggests, this is a movie that springs from the fantasy entertainment that Japanese kids grow up with: Godzilla movies, sci-fi animation, manga comic strips and "hard-core" rock music. In Tsukamoto's hands, these childhood influences mature into more adult fantasies: dark sexual fantasies, fantasies of brutal violence, fantasies of molecular mutation, apocalyptic fantasies. Not for nothing have Tokyo critics described Tsukamoto as "Japan's answer to Sam Raimi, David Cronenherg and David Lynch."