Hagane is a young man who becomes enraptured with the yakuza Tosa and his tattoo, just before Tosa assassinates a rival. Seven years later, Hagane has become the most useless yakuza ever. He is driven away from a debt collection by the man’s wife, he wets himself when sent on an assassination, he gets mugged by a bunch of teenagers in a park, and the woman he wants calls him Limp Dick. When Tosa is released from prison, Hagane drives him to a country villa, where they are both gunned down. Their bodies end up with a Mad Scientist, who puts Tosa’s heart into a robot he has been building and Hagane’s head on top, and the new, improved Hagane sets out for revenge on the men who killed Tosa.
So we have Frankenstein, Tetsuo, and Robo-Cop all mixed together and wedged into a standard yakuza plot about maneuvering for position in the two gangs that have merged while Tosa was in prison.
Apparently left with nothing to do between his three movies released in 1997 and the four in 1998, Takashi Miike directed Full Metal Gakudo. This may have been intended for straight-to-video in Japan and it is hard to determine if this eventually ended up on the big screen, as did Fudoh, but it certainly looks like a movie and has been shown as such in cult film screenings in the US.
What makes it worth notice is that it is also funny, something we generally don’t associate with Miike or the other blood and gore directors who surfaced in the nineties. Sometimes Miike’s excesses are so extreme that they become laughably absurd, but here he seems to be intentionally going for laughs and in many cases getting them. We still have some of the expected excess – severed heads kicked across the room, blood spurts, explosions, even a bit of necrophilia thrown in – but Hagane is still the inept Hagane even after he gets his super powers.
Perhaps the best sight gag comes when he blocks a getaway car, which splits in half around him, but he shorts out in the rain, uses a silly little dance to block bullets fired at him, has to sing himself a Russian lullaby if he overheats, bends pipes with his head, and eats metal chunks in milk for his breakfast cereal. Oddly enough, one joke they set up – Hagane’s new, enormous penis (fogged out by the censors) – is never actually used for any sex scenes and his X-ray vision is used to detect dangers through walls but never to show us any naked women. In that sense, Miike seems to be learning some restraint. Even the occasional insertion of rock music is limited.
He also seems to be developing an interest in his characters as humans. Coming between Rainy Dog and 1998’s Bird People in China and the coming-of-age movie Young Thugs: Nostalgia, the film gives Hagane and Yukari, Tosa’s old mistress, genuine feelings. This is of course common to the artificial man concept since Frankenstein, so nothing profound or earth-shatteringly new is produced. But Tsuyoshi Ujiki and Shoko Nakahara play their scenes like something more than just the stereotypes usually found in yakuza movies, which are still present in all the other characterizations.
The Mad Scientist, happy with his creation, has also set out to make a pinku robot, but the female bodies he buys are always too ugly for him. When he arrives on the scene after Yukari dies and Hagane appears to be dead, it looks as if a Bride of Frankenstein sequel is being set up, particularly as Hagane opens one eye, but if a sequel was made, I can’t find it.
All in all, an entertaining but not great movie, but seen through the lens of the present, a sign that one of contemporary Japan’s most varied and talented directors is expanding the vocabulary that would lead to Audition and the Hara-kiri remake, as well as the wild pastiche of Sukiyaki Western Django.
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