Revisiting Tetsuo

Watched Tetsuo: The Iron Man last night courtesy of Third Window’s excellent Blu-Ray (UK, B-locked)… Shinya Tsukamoto’s spaltterpunk classic remains as astonishing as ever, even more so with the high-def upgrade, my eyes were poring over details in the image - the incredibly elaborate costumes, the film’s unrelenting grimy textures – the actors perpetually smeared with oil and grease and unspeakable bodily fluids. At 67mins the film is brimming over with more ideas and innovation than a dozen flat-packed Marvel films – the sequences where characters speed around the back-alleys of Tokyo are particularly fantastic, and watching the film last night, I enjoyed seeing shades of other favourite films – Eraserhead, Videodrome, The Fly, The Evil Dead, Sōgo Ishii’s Burst City and his Einstürzende Neubauten film Halber Mensch…

As I was searching the Net for a particular still from the film I came across something called Tetsuo: The First Cut – which included the following text:

“This "director's cut" edition of Shinya Tsukamoto's breakthrough film Tetsuo: The Iron Man was released in 2010 as a part of the Perfect Tetsuo boxset to coincide with the Japanese opening of the latest part in the Tetsuo saga, The Bullet Man. Contains about 10 minutes of never-before-seen material”

My initial thought was that some 10mins worth of deleted footage was simply inserted back into the film and was expecting these deleted scenes to be included among the extras on the Third Window Blu, but not so. Has anyone seen this 77min cut of Tetsuo ?