... aka: Call Me トゥナイト
... aka: Call Me Tonight
... aka: Pink Noise Volume 1: Call Me Tonight
Directed by:
Tatsuya Okamoto
At "Telephone Communication Madonna," sexy young ladies are not only willing to talk dirty to you on the phone but also have no issue meeting complete strangers who are really, really weird in person. Frequent caller Ryo Sigiura is one such really, really weird person. Though he's a good-looking young man, he has problems whenever he tries to masturbate. No, he has no issue getting it up or getting aroused, it's just that he sees "lights and birds and stuff..." before passing out and then wakes up to find he's shredded his clothes and his entire home has been demolished.
Despite hearing that bizarre tale, phone sex worker Suuko decides to go have drinks with him at a diner. There, she attempts to cure him of his problem by rubbing her leg up and down on his crotch. That only manages to give him a nose bleed that gets so bad he covers the entire floor with a pool of blood. And then he miraculously transforms into a huge-mouthed monster with fangs, tentacles and claws. Before doing any real damage, he transforms back into his human form. Suuko grabs him by the arm and the two run away and duck into a late night showing of the Corman production GALAXIE [sic] OF TERROR (1981)! He's fine there until the alien slug rape scene comes on and then he transforms again. Suuko moves to the safety of another row and concludes that seeing or thinking about "perverted things" must be what sets him off.
Finding herself unable to just give up on him, Suuko accompanies the monster-man back to a hotel room and hatches a plan to help cure him of his affliction. She first decides that frequent exposure to sex and sex-related thing may be the remedy, so she takes him to a sleazy part of the city, where sex magazines and strippers both cause him to transform. The two are trailed by tall female bodybuilder / photographer Maki and her short, scrawny male sidekick, who takes a bunch of photographs of what's going on. When the photos get back to Maki's sister, Oyuki, she immediately recognizes Suuko as one of her high school classmates; a model student named Rumi Natsumi. Rumi is basically the anime equivalent of the "High School Honor Student by Day.... Hollywood Hooker by Night" lead in the previous year's Angel (1985).
When Oyuki's not in school, she leads up a vicious biker gang and when she's not doing that she's hanging out in a bar chain smoking and sucking down whiskey. These high school gals have quite active social lives! Oyuki finds herself developing the hots for Ryo so she and her gang kidnap him and Rumi and take them to an abandoned building. The plan is for her to rape him while her goons get to gang rape Rumi. But that doesn't go off quite as planned when Ryo transforms into an even bigger monster with multiple heads. The butch sister rides her motorcycle over and shoots the monster in the mouth with a rocket launcher (!!) but that doesn't even stop it.
This 30-minute OVA, which was actually marketed as an ORHA (original romantic horror animation), start out promising enough. There's an amusing theme song and a number of surprisingly funny bits and horror references (including a Fright Night jigsaw puzzle, a knock-off of Weird Tales magazine called "World Tales" and transformation scenes that intentionally echo both An American Werewolf in London and The Hulk) sprinkled throughout. Having the phone sex worker actually try to help the troubled male lead instead of fleeing for her life as most of us would do, is also an unexpected touch and leads to the beginnings of a charmingly offbeat relationship between the two. But the breezy horror-comedy vibe of the first half, which somehow manages to avoid being too mean-spirited, goes away once the bikers take center stage and things become overly serious and distasteful. There's also something just really unsatisfying about how none of the bad guys / gals pay for any of their crimes. In fact, our leads are basically all chummy with their rapists by the finale!
This was first released on VHS by C. Moon Home Video in Japan, as part of a series called "Pink Noise," which lasted up to at least four volumes. Volume #2 is the action / adventure Campus Special Investigator Hikaruon (1987), Volume #3 is the horror / sci-fi Evil Dragon War Chronicles (1987) and Volume #4 is the hentai comedy Body Jack (1987). All of these tapes run about half-an-hour. This one was also released on laserdisc and there was a soundtrack album released by Riv. Star Records.
★★
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