‘964 Pinocchio’: The movie with the longest continuous vomit scene
When Carlo Collodi sat down to write The Adventures of Pinocchio ahead of its first publication in 1881, he could have never imagined it would go on to become a regular staple of the film industry, which might have been because the medium didn’t exist yet. Beyond that, he definitely couldn’t have envisioned his story serving as the inspiration behind the longest vomit scene in cinema history.
There have been countless adaptations of the story through the years, and not all of them have been good. Disney’s 1940 animation is a classic, but Roberto Benigni was responsible for one of the worst movies of the 21st century when he decided that even though he was 50 years old, he was the perfect candidate to play the title role in a reimagining that he also co-wrote and directed.
Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion fantasy won an Academy Award for ‘Best Animated Feature’, which was released the very same year Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks reunited for a live-action remake that was an abject sack of crap. However, of the myriad of Pinocchio spins that have made their way to screens over the years, none of them are anywhere near as insane as Shozin Fukui’s Pinocchio 964.
The source story has been dubbed timeless for several good reasons, but that still didn’t explain why the co-writer and director opted to use it as the basis for a psychotic cyberpunk horror that stands out as one of the most uniquely bizarre fantasy flicks ever made. Mileage will vary as to whether or not it’s actually good, but it can’t be argued that it isn’t the singular result of one very demented filmmaker’s vision.
In Fukui’s mind, it was time for Pinocchio to be reborn as a humanoid sex robot raised in a factory and then cast out into the real world after suffering erectile dysfunction. He gets his memory wiped – perhaps to avoid spilling trade secrets – where he ends up befriending a homeless amnesiac, all while 964‘s twist on Geppetto tasks a rogue band of mercenaries to track down and destroy the rogue sex bot, in a desperate attempt to prevent him from gaining sentience and self-awareness.
As for the vomit? It doesn’t even have to do with the character who wants to be a real boy, but his vagrant associate Himiko. The scene in question runs for several minutes and involves nothing other than her spewing her guts out for an unnecessarily extended period of time, echoing the shared metamorphizes the two central figures in the story go through in order to shed the skins they’d been given and become the truest version of themselves. Or something, because in all honesty, it’s difficult to discern exactly what the fuck is supposed to be going on.
Does Disney’s Pinocchio feature the wooden plaything racing through the streets while covered in blood before murdering the people who created him, tearing off his own face, and then launching it at somebody else so that it takes over their entire head in a sequence that could justifiably be described as Cronenbergian? No, it does not, and it’s even poor Himiko who ends up getting two faces for the price of one. On the plus side, she probably didn’t throw up because there couldn’t possibly be anything left after the earlier scene.
