There are bad movies. Then there are movies so bad they become a cult curiosity. And then there’s 964 Pinocchio (1991), a Japanese cyberpunk horror film that asks the bold question: What if Geppetto’s little puppet wasn’t trying to be a real boy, but instead a memory-wiped erectile dysfunction cyborg wandering through a vomit-soaked fever dream?
Shozin Fukui’s underground nightmare has been hailed in some circles as one of the best examples of Japanese cyberpunk. Which circles, exactly? Probably ones drawn in crayon on a bathroom wall by a sleep-deprived grad student who just drank turpentine for inspiration. Because while 964 Pinocchio does indeed embody the cyberpunk ethos—neon, body horror, and existential breakdowns—it also plays like a film made by people who lost a bet with David Cronenberg.
The Premise: Erectile Dysfunction, But Make It Sci-Fi
Our hero, if you can call him that, is Pinocchio 964: a memory-wiped sex slave cyborg who gets tossed out like expired sushi because he can’t perform in bed. Yes, you read that right. A multi-million yen company decided the best use of their cybernetic R&D was building robot gigolos—and then firing them for ED. Imagine Skynet, but with performance anxiety.
Pinocchio wanders the streets of Tokyo like a malfunctioning Roomba until he meets Himiko, a homeless girl who also had her memory wiped, but somehow retained her ability to color-coordinate scarves and draw maps of the city. Himiko takes him in, teaches him to speak (through a process that involves shrieking like a banshee for several hours), and then they fall in love. Well, “love” in the 964 Pinocchio universe means vomiting, bleeding, and leaking every fluid known to man until your apartment looks like a Gallagher watermelon show.
The Characters: Suffering, Screaming, Spitting Cherries
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Pinocchio (Haji Suzuki): Imagine if a zombie, a blow-up doll, and a malfunctioning blender had a baby. That’s Pinocchio. He spends the first 40 minutes drooling, screaming, and running in circles. He finally “wakes up” during a kissing scene that somehow triggers his body to mutate like leftover sushi left in the sun.
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Himiko (Onn-chan): Starts off as the kind-hearted caretaker, ends up shoving garbage into Pinocchio’s mouth and chaining him to a concrete pyramid like she’s auditioning for American Horror Story: Tokyo Drift. Her big arc? Betraying Pinocchio over noodles.
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The Head Director (Mitsuji Otsubo): A boss whose managerial style is mostly yelling “DIE!” at his creations while his secretary spits cherries into a bowl for him to eat. Corporate culture in Japan has never looked healthier.
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The Secretary (Kyoko Hara): She spits cherries, convulses dramatically, and looks like she’s perpetually auditioning for a Lynch film. Honestly the most relatable character in the movie.
The Aesthetics: Vomit, Pus, and Existential Dread
If you thought Tetsuo: The Iron Man was too coherent, 964 Pinocchio is here to punish you. The camera lurches, zooms, and convulses like it’s also suffering from cybernetic ED. Every frame is sticky with fluids—blood, sweat, spit, vomit, maybe even soup stock. The film doesn’t just blur the line between horror and absurdity, it runs at that line screaming and trips face-first into a sewer grate.
There’s a “romantic” interlude where Pinocchio and Himiko make out, and instead of sparks flying, both begin puking like college freshmen at a tequila festival. It’s supposed to symbolize metamorphosis. To me, it symbolized food poisoning.
The Plot: A Frenzied Game of “What the Hell Is Happening?”
Pinocchio remembers who he is. Himiko remembers who she is. Then both promptly lose their minds. Himiko betrays Pinocchio by feeding him trash like an expired Tamagotchi. Pinocchio escapes, sprints through Tokyo at Mach 3 while random extras recoil in horror, and eventually confronts his evil corporate creators.
How does he defeat the boss? By disemboweling him with the speed and subtlety of a deranged Subway sandwich artist. Then Himiko demands he kill himself. Instead, she tears her own face off, revealing a stone head, which Pinocchio rips off and wears like a grotesque Halloween mask. Roll credits.
That’s not a spoiler—it’s a public service announcement.
The Themes: Autonomy, Memory, and Explosive Diarrhea
Yes, there are themes buried somewhere in this slurry of neon goo. 964 Pinocchio is about autonomy, about the dehumanization of bodies in late capitalism, about love between outsiders. But mostly, it’s about fluids. If you edited out every scene of spewing, spraying, or leaking, the runtime would drop from 97 minutes to a tight 12.
The metaphor for memory erasure? People wandering around Tokyo looking confused. The metaphor for love? Force-feeding your partner noodles until they mutate into a shrieking hellbeast. The metaphor for freedom? Ripping someone’s head off and wearing it like a Party City mask. Fukui doesn’t just hit you over the head with symbolism—he rips your head off and wears it while vomiting on your shoes.
The Experience: Like Being Trapped in a Fever Dream… With Cherries
Watching 964 Pinocchio is less like watching a movie and more like being waterboarded with miso soup while someone screams “CYBERPUNK!” into your ear. The pacing lurches between incoherent screaming fits and extended scenes of people drooling into their laps. The dialogue, when decipherable, sounds like it was written during a ketamine trip.
The movie’s original UK title, Screams of Blasphemy, is hilariously accurate. That’s what you’ll be doing about halfway through—screaming “blasphemy!” at your TV while praying for mercy.
Cult Status: Because Someone Had to Love It
Of course, 964 Pinocchio has achieved cult status among fans of Japanese underground cinema. To them, this movie is raw, fearless, and visionary. And sure, if by “visionary” you mean “a vision you have right before paramedics sedate you.”
There’s always a crowd that will champion movies precisely because they’re abrasive and incomprehensible. To those fans, I say: congratulations. You’ve built an immunity to cinematic sewage. For the rest of us, 964 Pinocchio is less a film and more an endurance test designed to see how long you can last before turning it off and googling cat videos.
Final Verdict: Puppet, Please
In theory, 964 Pinocchio could have been a fascinating meditation on identity and control in a cyberpunk hellscape. In practice, it’s 97 minutes of screaming, vomiting, and cherry-spitting side characters. It’s like if Geppetto built his puppet in a meth lab and Pinocchio’s big dream was just to be put out of his misery.
Shozin Fukui may have wanted to push boundaries, but what he created was a movie that mostly pushes the audience to the bathroom. Cyberpunk is supposed to be about high tech and low life. Here it’s about low coherence and high nausea.
