Crouched in a nest of rusting wire and scrap metal, a man grits his teeth. Taking hold of a rusting knife, he cuts a deep gouge into his tensed thigh. Blood spills out, the torn fat and muscle catching on the blunt metal edge. Dropping the blade, the man picks up a ribbed metal tube, dragging it across his pure white teeth and down to his lacerated thigh. Within moments the pipe is forcefully pushed into the bleeding wound and the gouge sealed with a tattered bandage. Tetsuo: The Iron Man has begun.

Rising up and out of the Japanese underground, Shinya Tsukamoto's debut film Tetsuo: The Iron Man revitalised a dwindling period of creativity within the Japanese film industry. This low budget monochrome nightmare was - and perhaps still remains - unlike anything seen before. Tetsuo is not so much a film but more of a cinematic assault of visceral images contained within a fragmented narrative, its frantic pace all cut to a pounding industrial soundtrack. Tsukamoto's melting pot of revenge, transformation and desire took the imagery of horror, science fiction and pornography and mutated them into a metal fetishists wet dream. At its most basic, Tetsuo is simply the rage fuelled transformation of a nobody into a biomechanical being, who then fucks his wife - to death - with his newly acquired, high powered penis drill and then sets about destroying another equally revenge fuelled biomechanical being. As a film it has to be seen to be believed. As a template for all of Tsukamoto's subsequent films, Tetsuo has it all: stark monochromatic images nervously shaking through hand-held camera work, lingering close ups of metal, streams of pouring blood, exaggerated bullet wounds and sweat dappled skin.

Given the content of Tetsuo, the original idea for Tsukamoto's most recent film, A Snake of June, was a lot more violent, a lot more pornographic and a lot more immoral than the version finally released. This is even more unsurprising given that Tsukamoto wanted to film A Snake of June before his debut feature. Shot in steel blue tones, A Snake of June is remarkably sedate in comparison to all of Tsukamoto's films, working more as a culmination of the directors thematic concerns than his visual ones. Replacing blatant violence with blatant eroticism, a terminally ill voyeur sets about changing the lives of a repressed couple, demanding that the slender wife, Rinko, live out her sexual fantasies in public whilst simultaneously humiliating her fat, balding husband. As with all of Tsukamoto's films, opposites attract and the film is more about the failure of a relationship and an attempt to reconcile differences than it is about sex and death.

Beautifully filmed in a constant downpour, Tsukamoto's hand held camera lingers on Rinko's wet flesh as she walks through the Tokyo streets in a tight miniskirt. As tender as these images are, Tsukamoto once again makes a fetish of the surface of the skin and seems as though he cannot help himself by setting such beauty against a dark backdrop of cancer and impending death.

In the thirteen years between Tetsuo and A Snake of June, Tsukamoto has directed five other films, the most notable being the sequel to Tetsuo, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer and Tokyo Fist. Beneath their ultra violent surface, both films continue Tsukamoto's exploration into rage, repression, transformation and relationships. The Body Hammer places another innocent nobody at the centre of an experiment to fuse metal with flesh, predictably resulting in the unleashing of an uncontrollable hybrid bent on destruction. Like Tetsuo, Body Hammer is extreme cyber-flesh, a glorious fusion of cold metal theory and warm flesh, where arms distend into gun barrels and ruptured skin reveals a whole arsenal of shimmering oil-black weaponry.

Appearing four years before David Fincher's beauty boy beat em' up Fight Club, Tokyo Fist is probably one the most frantic and violent films ever made. As always with Tsukamoto, the plot can lead to only one obvious conclusion - another revenge fuelled transformation that will conclude in gut wrenching bodily destruction. Edited at Tsukamoto's trademark speed of full throttle, Tokyo Fist chronicles the consequences of a chance meeting between two school friends. Whilst Tsuda has become another anonymous Tokyo citizen, Kojima is a successful professional boxer who soon begins to flirt with Tsuda's fiancé. Intimidated by his friend, Tsuda begins an obsessive fitness regime in an effort to win back his girl. Once his transformation is complete, the battle between old friends can begin.

Within Tsukamoto's world transformation can be a liberating experience. Repressed anxiety and desire find their outlet through mutation, a mental and physical revolution in which former identities are consumed as new beings are born of metal and rage: the weak finally find their strength and can start to live again.