MOVIE REVIEW: 964 PINOCCHIO (1991)

Direction/Screen Story/Editing by Shozin Fukui

Screenplay by Shozin Fukui, Makoto Hamaguchi, Naoshi Goda

Cinematography by Kazunori Hirasawa

Music by Hiroyuki Nagashima

Starring

Haji Suzuki as 964 Pinocchio

Onn-chan as Himiko

. . .

“After we complete this map, people like us will have a better life. Then we won’t need a memory to live in this town.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Once upon a time in 1990s Japan you have a psychosurgically brainwashed sex slave named/labelled/numbered 964 Pinocchio. For mysterious reasons, Pinocchio ran away from his owner, a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite. This horny woman contacts the criminal organization who created Pinocchio, perhaps hoping for a replacement or, failing that, a refund, but these sinister entrepreneurs threaten her life. The horny lady’s out her costs, but as long as she stays quiet she gets to live. Meanwhile, a trio of flunkies of the sex slavers take to the streets to attempt to hunt down the missing living product. This depraved operation is so out of touch with mainstream society that the flunkies don’t really know how to approach folks. It doesn’t help that they dress like cult members while acting like total creeps. 

Pinocchio wanders the street, grunting, and flailing, and wailing inarticulately. He’s pale, skinny, twitchy, and has a tuft of goofy orange hair near his widow’s peak. He’s a sight. We see him shambling and freaking out among huge crowds of early 1990s shoppers and salarymen in a large city in Japan. Throughout 964 Pinocchio we get scenes of science fantasy hysteria played against real world commercial locations that create the sensation of underground fetish sex club people bursting out among normie consumers like supernatural intrusions of poltergeists or demons or yokai. You sort of expect the Ghostbusters to get called on the scene.

We are introduced to a homeless, unemployed woman named Himiko, who passes the time by sitting on a sidewalk drawing maps of the city. She is frequently approached by salarymen on lunch breaks who think she’s a sex worker. Himiko has lost her memory, and so she draws maps for herself and to help out other amnesiacs. One day, she sees Pinocchio freaking out in the street. He sees her back, and dives into her lap. There’s a spark between these two. Himiko, as it happens, is all too happy to adopt a stray sex slave. At first, she seems to be a source of hope in Pinocchio’s cursed existence. But we soon enough discover that Himiko, despite her also being an outsider, gets off on abusing him. Somehow, her relationship with Pinocchio awakens her buried memories of working as a nurse at the evil sex slave company. Ultimately, we are left with the implication that both Himiko and Pinocchio were victims and products of hideous psychosurgical experiments. 

Pinocchio’s inexpressible rage and trauma cause slimy, low budget mutational effects, that are greatly enhanced by actor Haji Suzuki’s wild physical performance. Himiko’s buried sadist identity expresses itself when she constructs a steel leash, shackles, and weight to torment Pinocchio. There’s an impressively filmed and edited sequence where Pinocchio gains super speed powers and races out of the city, into a rural area, and to a factory which seems to conceal the sex slave operation which is strongly reminiscent of a sequence in Tetsuo the Iron Man. Another standout scene involves Himiko freaking out and copiously vomiting while wandering underground pedestrian tunnels that is obviously inspired by Isabelle Adjani’s memorable meltdown in Possession. 

A less successful sequence involves the sex slaver flunkies attacking Pinocchio with an experimental weapon. It’s too dark, and too frenetic to follow the action, but this is the one dud in an otherwise sharp and propulsive low budget production. 

By the end of it all, I found myself wondering who wasn’t a product of brainwashing in 964 Pinocchio. The mad scientist who runs the sex slave business is a total nut-he seems to have brainwashed himself. Himiko says she draws maps for other amnesiacs-so it isn’t just Pinocchio, it could be lots of malfunctioning sex slaves who have crossed her path. And when you consider the recurring images of normie crowds observing these crazy characters but staying the hell back . . . well, it left me with the sense of a society with a howling open secret. This is also a clever move for a low budget film which can only afford to spend so much time shooting in malls and department stores and train stations before overstaying their welcome. Just use the detachment and impatience of anonymous passersby to further alienate the weirdo outsider protagonists. 

964 Pinocchio is a purposeful blast of Japanese cyberpunk hysteria. You get a doomed sadomasochistic Romeo and Juliet raising hell among clueless, checked-out shoppers who both mutate towards a grotesque final coupling. Yes, it’s mostly about the vibe, but there’s more story and characterization than I expected. It even has a touch of that Blade Runner ambiguity about who is and who isn’t a manufactured being. 964 Pinocchio suggests that in a hyperconsumerist society even people will become product components if such markets become attractive to capital. Mutants freaking out in the department store are the canaries in the coal mine. 

So stay alert!

BONUS: Stick around for the mid-credits scene. It’s fun.

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #29: WURM: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1991)

 

Camera pans across people in a science fiction setting inside a letterbox rectangle suspended in an abstracted void

Bridge scenes a la Trek

But your vessel is a mechamorphosing Jules Verne burrowing drill tank that also has a fighter jet mode

Captain of this ship is a beautiful green haired woman named Moby

Who is, um, a pop star?

She's got a great look in any case: green hair, red knee-high boots, shiny red superhero fetish gear all around,

and Moby's got a crew of much less glamorous people all around her,

game wasn't clear who or what these people are supposed to be-scientists? explorers? musicians? college students? 

I assume the instruction manual explains things, 

but I didn't have access to that, 

so I'm going by what's in the game. 

And it's kinda vague. 

I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be scientists, some kinda governmental survey team-their transforming flying drill tank is clearly an output of some kind of pricy military-industrial complex-but maybe they're some kind of private sector outfit? 

I guess that's possible. 

Maybe this world is one in which ultratech military-industrial-scientific complexes exist on the scale of small groups or families or teams, some kind of a post-nation state type of deal,

and/or

maybe the people are the outputs of sentient flying drill tanks who need meatspeople puttering around inside their bridges and cockpits to feel whole

-to fill hole-

some kind of posthuman longing for the creator-bipeds of yore type of deal,

some kinda whomadewho type of deal-

-the flying drill tank can alternate between a fighter jet form and a drill tank-but the drill tank can fly and drill through geological obstacles whereas the fighter jet can't drill through anything

-it's like the drill tank dreams of being a fighter jet, soaring through open skies, as opposed to burrowing deeper into the underworld, deeper into a dark past better left forgotten-

-your journey begins in the middle of things, visuals, terse dialogue, launching into side scrolling shooter action, wherein you lay waste to scores of strange, huge organisms who seemingly just happen to live there, 

or maybe they were bred for war by some secret nation beneath the surface of things,

and all this alternates with first person battles with giant boss monsters which you can only defeat by increasing your POSSIBILITY to 100%

which you do by a combination of communication 

and devastation

the communication part entails consulting your crew members for scientific analysis of the hulking boss beasts

the devastation part entails aligning your targeting reticle over scientifically determined weak spots on the monster's body,

and then Moby disembarks from the drill tank to wander mazelike passages until she stumbles into battles with acrobatic underworlders who flicker in and out of existence until you definitively end them with a combination of your raygun and your martial arts high kicks-

I was never sure if I was fighting high tech enemies with malfunctioning thermoptic camosuits or if they were merely half-ghost/half memories fighting one last hurrah against invading overworlders such as myself,

tedious little final stands

down here in the dark

but sometimes that's all an underworlder's got left-

but it shall all end 

once you've harvested power orbs from the corpses of all the boss monsters

which allows you to unlock a final cut scene

with a spectral hologram woman of yore filling an abstracted void 

with a segmented text scroll revealing a secret history of ancient vendettas sparking off into antediluvian Forever Wars-

usually you get this kind of text at the beginning of a science fantasy saga, but here you have to work for it, exposition dump as final reward-

-and then it's over.

You learn of humanity's cursed nature,

its vindinctive, bloodthirsty desires going all the way back to long vanished Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu,

our forbears constructed the Bomb within our Deepest Background,

our most subterranean selves,

source of all dreams of apocalyptic annihilation,

atomically permafucked from the jump,

only a hologram anime girl left to instill us with our most secret history,

to tell us that love is the only way,

to send us out of subterranean depths of vengeful ghosts nurturing obscure grudges with fading technologies,

maybe now

the drill tank can let go of its nagging dreams of bipedal meatspeople,

loose its supersonic self

to soar through open skies

no more shame in the posthuman

ever again

-May 2014-July 2022

COMICS REVIEW: WEAPON X (1991)

 

Story and Art by Barry Windsor-Smith 

Lettered by Jim Novak

Edited by Terry Kavanagh 

Assistant Editors Mark Powers and Kelly Corvese

Editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco 

Originally published in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84.

. . .

"Logan could have killed us all . . . I met his eyes for a second . . . filled with hate and fury . . . but I couldn't tell if it was some animal bloodlust . . . or horror at what we have done to him!" 

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Weapon X is comic book science fantasy body horror dealing with themes of out of control rage, human experiments, mind control, and the question of free will. Strong stuff for Marvel Comics in the early 1990s . . . strong stuff even now, actually. Usually, you would have to go to David Cronenberg, Shinya Tsukamoto, or Katsuhiro Otomo for this kind of action, but here it is on paper and in color. Only the lack of full frontal nudity and swearing marks it as a Comics Code Authority Approved book. Weapon X is, unusually for its time, an uncompromised work of mainstream super hero horror comics. 

There's a man named Logan who likes to drink and fight and wander. He spends his nights in flophouse rooms just like the Blues Brothers or in Men's Only accommodations run by fundamentalist Christians like what Charles Bronson sets up in Death Wish 2. Logan is full of rage which fuels his rootlessness. If he has no attachments, no emotional connections, then his conscience need not be troubled if he goes around breaking the faces of other rage-poisoned men in barroom brawls. 

Wake up. Fight. Get shitfaced. Fall asleep. Repeat.

Logan need never step outside of this perfect rage-servicing system ever again. For he is a mutant with retractable claws and a strange 'healing factor,' a power that allows him to quickly heal from any and all injuries short of a direct hit from a ballistic missile. He cannot be easily killed, nor is the average drunken street brawler ever likely to humiliate him with defeat. Logan has nothing to fear.

Or does he?

As it turns out, Logan is of great interest to a secret organization that wishes to capture him to use as a live subject for horrifying psycho-surgical experimentation. Their purpose is to transform him into a living weapon that can be controlled at-a-distance, presumably for assassination purposes like poor Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate.  

But this secret operation has a much more effective technique than flaky Communist hypnosis. This is real science, true penetration into the mind via ultra-technology. And we get to see the whole process play out step-by-step. In Weapon X we get to see things from the perspective of the mad scientists even more than we get Logan's side of things. Yes, it's all comic book stuff. But it's so detailed that after you read it you'll probably come to expect this level of precision from other comic book villains, maybe even demand it. I know I did . . .

Logan is tranquilized, captured, stripped, shaved, and put in a sensory deprivation tank with all sorts of intravenous feeds of powerful painkillers and hallucinogens and who knows what else. Logan's kept in a medically induced coma for an unknown period while the mad scientists penetrate his brain with probes that allow them to view his innermost thoughts on huge telescreens. 

Logan's body is injected with a liquid adamantium substance that's manufactured in a nuclear reactor via processes that verge on the alchemical. This fanciful liquid steel bonds with his skeleton and the retractable/extensible knuckle claws that Logan has chosen not to use so as to conceal his identity as a mutant. After the adamantium bonds with his claws he inevitably causes injury to himself if he extrudes them, something he was choosing not to do prior to being captured. Once he is under the control of the mad scientists, they force him to extend and retract his claws-they force him to tear his own flesh.

They force him to bleed. 

So, it's not just a pure application these people are after-they get off on sadism, as well as total control of a human mind. 

Themes of paranoia are threaded in, beginning with the premise of being an outsider kidnapped by a sinister cabal-who are themselves serving an unseen master-and mutating into grotesque sequences of Logan running endlessly through a nightmare terrain that provokes strange spiky growths to burst forth from his already violated body. This is the horror of being out of control, of being invaded by technology, of losing your grip on reality, and always at the mercy of unknown sadists serving unknowable motives and masters. Taken out of the context of the expansive X-Men mythos, this works quite well as a standalone mindfuck. 

In addition to the compelling themes, we also have definitive visual portrayals of Logan in both his disguise as an alcoholic nobody and as a wild, bestial killing machine. When his rage is fully loosed, he slices scores of heavily armed and armored soldiers, and stands victorious-despite being pierced by many bullets-upon a hill of corpses. Logan, nude, stalks frozen psycho-scapes where he does battle with fearsome bears, tigers, and wolves. All the while, he is surveilled by the cruel, inscrutable faces of the mad scientists and their workaday technical staff. Dark fantasies of retribution are piped from Logan's brain onto telescreens. Eventually, Logan is reduced to being a live video game avatar to be piloted by the mad scientists through terrifying scenarios of primal combat. All of this is rendered in wintry white, lurid red/yellow/pink, chilling blue, and shadowy black. The colors are about what you expect from a comic of the time, but they are deployed vividly. 

I think, too, it must be noted that Weapon X has a single author: Barry Windsor-Smith. I think this is the main reason why the narrative flow is intricate without losing momentum. Dialogue text plays over the barrage of techno-invasions of Logan's body and mind. It's all worked out with precision timing. There's none of the static that's inevitably generated by the bullpen approach of your average super hero comic book of the time. Windsor-Smith is able to weave it all together as he sees fit, without having to second guess another writer or artist. 

Anytime I read another comic about Logan, I inevitably find myself thinking back to Weapon X. I even think of it when I read the ones that were published well before Weapon X even existed. Truly, its power changes Logan's past, present, and future. 

Now that's a mindfuck for you!