Apparently the recipient of numerous awards at the no-doubt- prestigious Pink Grand Prix, TWILIGHT DINNER, despite these plaudits, shares less with the landmark classics of Japanese erotica than it does your average American direct-to-video soft-core flick. Playing less like a fully formed narrative than an exhaustingly over-inflated first act stretched to (just barely) feature length, it's crafted well enough for what it is, but unfortunately what it is doesn't amount to all that much.
The whisper-thin plot follows grad student Kazuhiko's infatuation with a pair of sisters who have moved in next door. Consistently dressed in black and rarely appearing in the daytime (and always shrouded by sunglasses and a parasol), the women's erratic behavior screams "vampire" from the start. Nevertheless, love is blind, and Kazuhiko ends up seduced by the elder of the pair, who takes the opportunity to engage in some none-to-gentle nibbling on his neck. Overcome by a ravenous (and – in one legitimately surprising scene – bisexual) erotic hunger, Kazuhiko is soon ravaging his way through the neighborhood, his uncontrollable urge quickly driving him to an even more shocking climax
This final scene – presumably the film's sole raison d'etre – I won't spoil here, though the film does a pretty good job itself by adopting a shopworn police interrogation flashback structure that spells out where it's headed from essentially the opening frame. With this surprise out of the way, there's little left to do but slowly go through the motions, with Kazuhiko taking the majority of the run time to discover something the audience already knows from the start – that his neighbors are vampires. The cast is game and the sex scenes photographed well enough, but the production overall has a lonely, threadbare quality redolent more of cheapo mid-'90s American soft- core (long dialogue scenes played out in echoey rooms, a skimpy roster of rotating locations and cast members) than high- quality erotica. A glorified cameo by director (and frequent pink star) Kazuhiro Sano is certainly welcome, but unfortunately serves mostly as a reminder of his own far superior work.
