Tokyo Fist is, without a doubt, the strangest sports movie ever put to film.
When the (actually very serviceable, as a matter of fact) Him came out last here, it struck me that sports-centric horror was something I hadn’t encountered much in film at large – but that, on paper, it sounded like a pretty good fit for the world of the horror. That focus on exertion, the obsession, the physical and mental changes that come with mastering any sport – that’s the kind of thing that great horror is made of, you know?
Enter Shinya Tsukamoto. Tsukamoto is probably best known for his iconic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the fantastically odd and disturbing 1989 metal-man nightmare, but today, I’d like to talk about Tokyo Fist – a 1995 boxing body horror movie that’s exactly as weird as that descriptor would give you reason to think it was.
Tokyo Fist fits comfortably into Tsukamoto’s back catalogue – which is to say, it’s strange, narratively unsettled, and utterly fascinated with the distortion of the human body. The plot is simple, on paper at least – Tsuda (played by Tsukamoto himself) is a salesman who finds himself drawn into the world of boxing after an encounter with a one-time schoolfriend, while his girlfriend Hizuru (Kahori Fujii) finds herself caught between the two men.
Tsukamoto, both in performance and direction, finds a grotesqueness in every inch of the world Tokyo Fist inhabits – but not in the way you might think based on Tsukamoto’s previous work. There’s this sense of the sterility of modern life punctured by the grotesque but entirely human nature of what unfolds when we take control of our own bodies, for better or for worse. The towering, almost surreal shots of skyscrapers that dwarf Tsuda in his salesman days are a sharp contrast to boxing matches are marked with comically oversized goose-eggs bruises that spring up in a matter of seconds, people beaten to bloody, almost inhuman pulps. It’s an exceptionally violent film, both in and out of the ring – Hizuru explores her own bodily autonomy via body modification and piercings that eventually turn fatal – but there’s something almost cathartic about it in contrast to the deliberate coldness of the rest of these character’s lives and the world they inhabit. Civility is punctured by the obsession and action sparked by the boxing ring in much the same way that the body is marred by injury, extreme and exaggerated and impossible to ignore.
Tokyo Fist is an incredibly weird movie, but one that never feels random or loses its grip on a very compelling premise; it’s a sports movie that explores the extremes of the genre through a body horror lens, in the inimitable way that only Tsukamoto can. If you’ve seen it, I’d love to hear what you made of it, and what other sports movies you think explore the darker edges of the genre – let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Wikipedia)
No But Listen 