A truly weird expermental horror film, Pinocchio 964 (Pinokio Ruuto, 1992) explores torture & eroticism as a method of spiritual dissintegration, with transformation through surgery, to cyborgs or pinocchios that can withstand extreme abuse.

A beautiful girl, Himiko (Onn Chan), with no memory is discharged from the insane asylum, tossed back into the blind bland everyday world though by no means cured of her mental problems.

Living in the streets, she keeps guard with field glasses -- guarding against what none but she could know.

One day she spots a transformed patient (Hage Suzuki) still in his hospital gown, walking about the streets ignored by everyone. He's bald but for a tiny shock of hair in front.

He's seemingly retarded, but has really been lobotomized. Falling to the sidewalk in front of the girl, he mimes nursing from her breast. She takes him into her protection, leads him to the dark warehouse building in which she squats & hides.

As though he gave her a reason to be engaged in life, Himiko springs into action & takes care of Pinocchio 964.

She tries to teach him to say his name. But he seems deaf & will not mimic her. He's a jittery bouncing strange thing, but she treats him like a beloved brother, & they begin to forge something of a family together.

P-964 is an ex-human fully transformed into a cybernetic torture sex slave. He belonged to a wealthy, crazily costumed lesbian couple who wearied of him & discarded him like a worn-out toy because he could not maintain erections to their expectation. They set him free the way an irresponsible pet owner might turn some poor animal loose in the woods.

When the Pinocchio factory learns P-964 is at liberty in the city, they're upset, for if it becomes known their "hospital" is actually a sex-slave factory, the company could be in trouble.

Eventually P-964 begins to learn speech & become more & more human, less spastic, curious about who or what he is & why he's living inside the walls of a warehouse with a girl he never knew before.

The hopelessly memory-wiped duo are delightfully insane. The film is strangely compassionate despite the exploitation & sadism of the story. Our two nutjobs take on aspects of superheroes rather than street loonies & they fall truly in love.

All the while, the soundscape, created by Hiroyuki Nagashima, is hightly creative & appealing.


The mad scientist who oversees the manufacture of Pinocchios does so to get rich off the stupidity & perversion of the world.

But he serves an underground community & must from time to time clean up the problems such people create, & this means recovering the lost Pinocchio, which at any rate is physiologically so altered as to be unable to long survive without specific care.

Sadly, P-964 becomes extremely ill & begins to rapidly decay, to the horror of the mad Himiko who loves him. The shock of it all causes her to have a fit, during which part of her own memory returns, of having once been some kind of "nurse" killing people in a hospital. Apparently she worked in the Pinocchio factory before losing her mind, or having it lost for her.

She storms through streets & underground passages, a maniac vomiting copiously, then wallowing in her vomit like a sow in mud. When she returns to her dark squat, still gibbering, she finds P-964 is still alive, but bound within an organic hoop & clearly suffering.

He turns inside out explosively, expelling his black bones. Eventually he returns to some semblance of his abnormal self & the girl washes & cares for him, coming back from her own psychological journey beyond insanity.

Himiko takes P-964 to a junkyard & wields him into steal bondage. He had been wrong to trust her, for her own mental journey has changed her & now she wants only to enslave & torture him. It begins to look like being discovered by & returned to the factory could be the lesser evil!

The company's hunters learn where Himiko has P-964 chained. They plan to kill her & reclaim the Pinnochio to be reprogrammed. They use a totally unnecessary weird gas weapon. Himiko is clever in her madness & turns out to be a lot more than the hunters could handle.

Dragging his chains & permanent attachments, P-964 strives to be reunited with Himiko, for he still loves her for having restored part of his humanity before becoming the greatest of his tormentors. When it turns out she now wants only to kill him, he flees through tunnels & out into the city where life goes on for other people as though the world were a normal place.

He runs beyond the crowds, beyond the city, dragging the enormous weight to which he is weilded, having gained unimaginable strength. He is headed for the factory, seeking a revenge of the goriest sort. Everyone's profound ugliness is amped up when Himiko grows a giant head before the final surrealist encounter so extreme in its silliness that it's great.

A rivetting film overall due to central performances that go well beyond great acting, as there can't have been many touchstones in the actors' lives to draw on.

Not that Pinocchio 964's cyberpunk bizarrie is unprecidented; it borrows from sadomasochistic cultural imagery & changes it enough to not be cliche, & it borrows heavily from the Tetsuo: Iron Man (1989), the original of all masochistic techno-fetish films since.


Caterpillar (1988; not released until 1991) is a formative half-hour film by horror director Shozin Fukui, included as an Extra with a dvd release of Pinocchio 964.

It shows a pale guitarist generating macabre music that couldn't come from an electric guitar, singing unintelligibly into a microphone.

Cut to a girl walking down a bright street & through alleys. Then a young man collapses in a crowd, & nobody tries to help.

A weird silver creature with golden face is like a giant caterpillar stalking through the streets. Through all this there is no dialogue & only distorted sound.

Many additional surreal or unintentionally ridiculous events accumulate, adding up to nothing. The one-eyed android-like suffering kid in clown-white certainly is a percursor to Pinnochio 964, but that fact doesn't make this messy film particularly interesting or effective.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl