Review: Twilight of the Dark Master (1997)

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malnourished/ adj. suffering from the absence of some essential elements necessary for health.
underdeveloped/ adj. not fully developed; immature.
generic/ adj. characteristic of or relating to a class; general, not specific or special.

I had originally intended that the above definitions alone would comprise this review, but while those words may each be employed in the description of most of Twilight of the Dark Master, their use is not really warranted when discussing its final ten minutes — ten minutes which almost (but not quite) elevate the whole thing from the level of the decidedly average to that of the not-actually-all-that-bad.

It’s in the final act that Twilight of the Dark Master gets a bit of meat on the otherwise generic (hey!) demons-and-guardians bones of its first half-hour, which feels like an (unsuccessfully) edited-down version of a much longer anime. The characters suddenly become much more engaging, and the narrative resolution offered is a fairly spectacular (and fairly unexpected) statement about the corrupting influence of global economics, or something, which got me pretty excited. Excited, that is, until I remembered just how bland everything preceding it was — thirty-odd minutes of some effeminate guy with white hair and interesting posture looking for those twins from Bride with the White Hair (exactly the same in fact, only without the conjoining).

Twilight of the Dark Master isn’t bad, just average, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it. It would probably make for quite good late-night party viewing, as there’s enough material here for either a political discussion (the cultural logic of late capital, anyone?) or, for the more serious minded, several drinking games (spot the horn!). See what you can come up with…

5 sexy demon-grunts out of 10. No, wait…

5 demon sex-grunts out of 10.
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