Twilight Dinner – review

Director: Yutaka Ikejima

Release date: 1998

Contains spoilers

So the first thing to note is that the film Chô-inran: Shimai donburi gained the English title I’ve reviewed it under on its re-release in 2010, obviously because of a certain franchise.

More importantly we should note that it is a Pink Eiga film, which means it is sort of a softcore sex film… ish… There is no direct correlation between Japanese pink films in their broadest sense and porn – probably they are better described as sexploitation, but the core Pink film industry has quite defined features that they follow quite rigidly. Suffice it to say that the sex in this is very softcore, with no genitalia on show and certainly no more sexual than some of the 70s Euro-Horror.

Kyôsuke Sasaki as Kazuhiko 

It begins with a woman, Kumi (Reina Azuma), in a shower, dead and covered in blood. Her assailant, Kazuhiko (Kyôsuke Sasaki) is asked why he ate her pussy, literally, by the policemen questioning him. The subsequent film is his story and explores how he got there. It all began, he suggests, when two sisters, Tsukiko (Yumi Yoshiyuki) and Mayako (Kanae Mizuhara) moved into an apartment near him. He sees them as they take boxes up and finds a corkscrew on the floor. He takes it up to them and then helps them move their boxes in.

Tonic Wine

The two women have a lot of wine – Tsukiko buys and sells the stuff, it is suggested. Kazuhiko is attracted to the younger Mayako, who doesn’t work due to sun sensitivity and rarely leaves the apartment. She has a wine that she uses as a tonic and eventually does get intimate with Kazuhiko but will not kiss him claiming that her lips are too sensitive. He eventually persuades her to go for a meal with him but the sangria he gives her causes her to collapse.

Yumi Yoshiyuki as Tsukiko

Tsukiko admonishes him for taking her sister out but then comes on to him and later we hear that she always steals her sister’s beaus. When they have sex she bites his lip and this causes a change to come upon him. He can’t eat, he is overcome with thirst but can’t keep the water he drinks down. He also becomes bisexual, coming on to his friend and sleeping with a random bloke he meets. The waitress at his favourite joint is Kumi and she has always had a thing for him, which will take us full circle.

supping on blood

So not a huge amount of plot (though there is a nice twist at the end). The only other bit of lore we really get is the idea that the sisters suggest “their species” has to move residence every three months. This isn’t the greatest film generally, nor the most inventive pink film. However being the Pink Eiga standard 1 hour in length it also doesn’t outstay its welcome. There isn’t really too much to say about this and so I’ll move straight to a score of 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.