In the late eighties and early nineties, after the unusually immense popularity of Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo The Iron Man, the Japanese cyberpunk sub genre kicked its output into high gear. While they weren't everywhere the way a lot of spin offs are, the post Tetsuo cyberpunk films found enough of an audience in North America through gray market bootleg releases and arthouse and film festival screenings that Unearthed Films has seen fit to release a few of them for the North American market for the first time, complete with English subtitles and some fancy extra features.

So what exactly is 964 Pinocchio? Good question. The film begins when a manufactured sex slave (Hage Suzuki) is discarded by his clients (a pair of gothed out lesbians lunatics who periodically reappear throughout the film to add some lovely kinky hotness to the proceedings) and expelled from the strange brothel in which he is employed, unbeknownst to the owners of the fine establishment. This pasty bald guy ends up falling on a young woman named Himiko (Onn Chan) who is sitting on the street people watching one afternoon. Himiko feels sorry for the strange little guy and takes him back to her place – a dark room in an abandoned factory or warehouse.

As Himiko brings him back to health, she finds his name is Pinocchio and teaches him to communicate beginning with his name, then her name, then a few other basic words and sentences. One night, they finally have sex, and here's where the movie takes a drastic turn into 'huh?' territory. After they've bumped uglies and swapped spit, Humiko's treatment of Pinocchio begins to change quite drastically. Whereas she was kind and sympathetic to him, she now chains him up and abuses him verbally and physically, claiming that he is now her property. While all this has been going on, Pinocchio's creators have found that he's gone missing and in turn send out a few employees to look for him. They're supposed to bring him back to work, but he's changed now and so has Humiko.

Pinocchio 964 is an intense, insane, and just plain strange film. It's full of sex, violence, blood, vomit and degradation but as harsh as that may sound, underneath it all there's a strangely appealing sense of humor and even a quiet little story about a man trying to be himself in spite of his predetermined origins as a manufactured commodity. As the story progresses and gets stranger, so too does the camerawork and the special effects not only in quality but in quantity as well. By the time the final half hour of the film creeps up, things have pretty much gone ballistic and we're treated to the cinematic equivalent of a brain pummelling. When Humiko gets sick in the subway station, it isn't enough just to show her vomiting on the floor, she has to continue vomiting for a few minutes, then fall into it, then roll around in it, and then eat some of it.

The effects make use of some rather strange stop motion animation as characters explode blood and all manner of colorful bodily fluids out of various orifices while Shozin Fukui's direction ramps itself up with swirling cameras, extreme close ups, and rapid fire editing that wouldn't feel out of place in a late nineties industrial music video.

While I can pretty much guarantee that this film will alienate at least seventy five percent of the people who will read this review, I still can't hesitate to recommend this film. Less of a movie and more of a narrative experience, it's an excruciating strange movie that builds and builds and finally unloads on you in its almost pornographic excess. It hits you hard and it keeps hitting you until its finally all over – and you're all the better for it.

Video:

964 Pinocchio was shot on 16mm with the intention of being displayed fullframe, and that is exactly how Unearthed Films presents the movie on DVD. Colors are bold and bright but not over saturated except where intended by the filmmaker. While there is the odd speck of print damage and the like that creeps onto the image periodically it is never distracting and for the most part this movie looks really nice. A lot of the film takes place in the darker corners of husked out buildings so it's important for the black levels to remain stable and constant – thankfully they do just that. Contrast is balanced nicely and there are no major issues with mpeg compression or edge enhancement. For a low budget 16mm film oddity, 964 Pinocchio looks very good on this North American DVD debut.