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Rating: There are those guys who, driven by a craving for attention, believe they possess incredible qualities without realizing they are just ordinary people and not superheroes, which is unfortunately quite evident even today. But there are also those guys who are endowed with qualities they aren't even aware of. Qualities that, as in this film, might coincidentally have to do with machines or inanimate objects.
And speaking cinematically, the theme of flesh-machine fusion is perhaps one of the most complicated, chilling, yet also one of the most interesting among those addressed over the course of the last (almost) thirty years. It is no coincidence that very few have tackled this theme, of whom two stand out in particular: one is the Canadian David Cronenberg, who through works like "Videodrome" or "Scanners" managed to portray the inner anguish of his characters, the other is the one who has been nicknamed "the godfather of Japanese cyberpunk": Shinya Tsukamoto.
Everyone knows him for his masterpiece "Tetsuo: The Iron Man", a true cult movie from the late '80s, made on a low budget but with loads and loads of quality, devastating and extraordinary, unsettling and truthful, art in the truest sense of the word.
But perhaps not everyone knows that before this work, he had started with a series of Super 8 short films, through which he managed to make a name for himself and invent a style of his own, culminating in this medium-length film (about 45 minutes), titled "The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy".
The protagonist is Hikari (played by Tsukamoto himself), an introverted boy mocked by many for an electric pole sticking out of his back, but a great friend of the young Momo. Thanks to a time machine, Hikari will find himself unwittingly in the future, where thanks to the elderly teacher Sariba he will find a way to face the fearsome Shinsegumi vampires, intent on permanently removing light from the world by constructing a bomb powered by the life of an alluring woman. But here, he will discover an almost chilling truth...
One can already notice how abundantly that technique, which has become Shinya's calling card, is used: stop-motion, present in most scenes of the film (like Hikari’s fury, who will end up annihilating all the vampires, or the point where the time machine flies like a bullet between the metropolises of the Land of the Rising Sun to teleport the protagonist straight into the future), an element that gives Tsukamoto's works that almost music video effect that, let’s face it, is never a bad thing (especially if it's done by someone like Tsukamoto... it says it all). The soundtrack is astonishing, a bit noise, a bit punk, a bit electronic... a bit of everything.
"The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy" is the beginning of it all. Only after all this will come the two "Tetsuo" movies, "Tokyo Fist", "A Snake Of June" and whatever else belongs to the mind of this director, never quite understood by an ignorant public.
Perhaps, watching this work, there is a Hikari in each of us. Perhaps we are also "accidental" heroes. Perhaps we also have within us a hypothetical electric pole to use to defeat today’s threats. Something others envy but that unexpectedly helps us a lot.
Or not?
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