964 Pinocchio: The story behind the disturbing 1991 cyberpunk fairytale

In a nightmarish institution in industrial neo-Tokyo, a cybernetic sex slave is subjected to a power-drill lobotomy after failing to satisfy two handlers during an orgy. Abandoned at the edge of the city, the hapless android is adopted by a feral street urchin named Himiko, who teaches him to speak and to love in her subterranean sewer bedsit. But as Himiko’s mental state fractures and Pinocchio’s mad creator sets out to reclaim him, the fragile, spike-haired cyborg is thrust into a bustling metropolis that has no place for him. And in his turbo-charged bid for self-preservation, no man can stand in his way.

This is 964 Pinocchio (also known as Screams of Blasphemy and Pinocchio√964), a 1991 no-budget dystopian movie that takes the bones of the 1940 Disney fairytale classic and vomits them onto the streets of a near-future Japan as if Geppetto had just double-dropped. A cornerstone of the era’s ultra-DIY cyberpunk filmmaking scene, this high-voltage discharge of gory practical effects, ear-splitting sound design and reckless guerilla filmmaking finally receives its first-ever UK release on March March 2025 via ill-minded distributors 88 Films. 

The story begins in the 80s – a time when amateur filmmaking and independent post-punk groups were staging a kind of mutual underground revolution in Japan. As noise bands drew from industrial, ambient, and goth music, “painting their faces white and dressing in black, like Butoh dancers”, experimental filmmakers were grabbing 8mm and 16mm video cameras and shooting run-and-gun movies in junkyards and warehouses. “There was a lot of crossover between extreme rock and film,” says 964 Pinocchio director Shozin Fukui, who was a member of the band Hone at the time. “It was an incredibly stimulating movement.” As these pulse-quickening forms of expression gravitated towards one another, Fukui soon found himself presented with a wealth of exciting creative opportunities. 

“[Shinya] Tsukamoto was looking for a staff member who could drive a car for one day for the filming of Tetsuo: Iron Man,” Fukui tells Dazed, referring to the metal-fetishising sci-fi-horror movie now considered one of the most influential Japanese independent films ever made. Already a fan of Tsukamoto’s sense-jolting experiments with high-speed stop-motion on 8mm shorts like The Adventures of Denchu-Kozo, Fukui jumped at the chance to join his crew. But it was his hiring as a live-in assistant by Sogo Ishii (who was working with indie filmmaking troupe Directors Company at the time), that was Fukui’s dream come true moment. “He was an idol to me,” he says of the Crazy Thunder Road and Burst City auteur. “I absorbed as much as I could.”

It would be Ishii who insisted that Fukui should direct a feature. And soon, nourished from a diet of sci-fi and cyberpunk novels, and having gained experience in everything from special effects to editing while working on Ishii’s 1989 short The Master of Shiatsu, Fukui had his own unhinged story to tell. The only problem was he didn’t have any money. “I quit my job as an assistant director for commercial films and worked part-time at two video rental shops,” he says. “But I fell behind on rent and was evicted, and I essentially became homeless.” While crashing in bars and at friends’ homes, he pitched 964 Pinocchio to investors, initially raising a modest ¥10,000,000 (about £45,000 in 1991). The money ran dry halfway through filming – but not for a lack of seat-of-your-pants ingenuity.

“Bystander’s reactions were of clear physiological disgust... It was as though they wanted absolutely nothing to do with what was happening in front of them” – Shozin Fukui

“I studied the making of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead,” Fukui recalls of his shrewd, money-saving innovations. “I was inspired by how they built their own ‘shaky cam’ rigs because they couldn’t afford a Steadicam.” For 964 Pinocchio, this translated to borrowing a wheelchair from a local hospital to use for tracking shots (“by chance, someone on the crew used to be a nurse,” Fukui mentions in an archive interview on the Blu-ray release) and modifying boxes usually used for delivering ramen or soba to be used as dollies. The colourful gunk and DIY effects that supply the film’s most gut-churning moments (one scene feels like it was plucked straight out of the Nazi-melting finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark) came with their own challenges. “There was a lot of blood and liquid that we had to keep refilling, and cleaning up afterwards was difficult,” says Fukui. The cheap smoke bombs they used also “smelled very bad”, and were difficult to control: “It was a big problem in rooms where fire alarms were installed.” 

Practical FX pandemonium aside, it’s in the numerous off-the-chain, public-facing sequences that 964 Pinocchio really comes alive, with ad-libbed antics in the supermarket and rush hour crowd confrontations in the subway (“I happened to see Possession on VHS about six months before preparing to shoot and was shocked at how Isabella Adjani’s acting seemed to erupt from her body,” he says of the latter) cement the movie as one of the most visceral and neurotic ever to come out of Japan. Nowhere is this more evident than in the movie’s hair-raising climax, in which a straitjacketed Pinocchio convulses while dragging a steel pyramid through Tokyo’s busy streets, leaving crowds of wary onlookers looking utterly bemused in his wake.

“The way people suddenly jumped out of the way left a lasting impression on me,” says Fukui, who credits the spontaneity of these scenes as the crux of their impact. And though he claims the crew never had any serious clashes with any members of the public (“street performance art was booming at the time, so people were used to seeing unusual activities,” he explains), there were occasions where bystanders couldn’t hide their feelings towards the production. “[In some instances], their reactions were of clear physiological disgust,” he recalls. “It was as though they wanted absolutely nothing to do with what was happening in front of them.”

After an “extremely tough” six months of shooting – “and I don’t mean ‘on-and-off’,” Fukui emphasises in a Blu-ray bonus feature, “we shot every day” – the film was finally complete. The process had devoured another ¥10,000,000 in funding, while the crew’s do-or-die mentality had almost, at one point, cost them their lives. “After a series of all-nighters, both the producer and I dozed off for a moment while driving and ended up crashing into a pillar at a used car centre on the roadside,” Fukui recalls. “As luck would have it, we were later able to shoot at the very same hospital we were brought to.” 

“Our goal was to completely overwhelm the audience and make them trip out... It was fantastic. Some people even got sick and we had to call an ambulance”

But the battle wasn’t quite over. Because on the other side of production lay an even bigger challenge—getting the film seen. Haunted by the memory of his short film Caterpillar being attended by an audience of two during its debut screening (“It made me very depressed”, he recalls), Fukui had flyers and posters put up at music venues, movie theatres, galleries, restaurants and event spaces. “We even painted Pinocchio√964 on the car we used for filming and drove it around the city,” he recalls. In the end, it was word-of-mouth that drew a crowd for the movie, spurred on by an unconventionally amped-up showcase of the film at an ad hoc screening venue.

“Our goal was to completely overwhelm the audience and make them trip out,” says Fukui, describing an early screening at a local music venue. He’d brought along his own PA system and partnered playback with a live band performance. With the audio tracks already mixed at such high volumes that “it felt like I was creating a progressive rock album”, the concept for the event became ‘the screening itself as a live performance’ and word soon got out that Fukui had made a movie that was even louder than the bands that played there. The demand led to 10 weeks of sold-out showings at Nakano Musashino Hall – an actual cinema that also had the benefit of being “even louder”. On some evenings, they’d pack 200 people into the 72-seater venue. “It was fantastic,” Fukui recalls. “Some people even got sick and we had to call an ambulance.”

In the years thereafter, the movie would drift into the obscure realms of cult cinema–but it’s lost none of its impact today. In the words of industrial music veteran and ex-Coil member Stephen Thrower, it’s a film that gives the sense of “being forced into the back of your seat by the blast of what you’re seeing”. He’s not wrong. The only thing left, then, is to stock up on earplugs – and maybe a crash helmet, too.