Bleak House: Japan’s “The Bedroom” (1992)

Kyoko (Kiyomi Ito) is a lonely wife, searching for connection to her cold husband. As is only natural, she begins attending a club called The Sleeping Room in which she lets men molest her while she is doped up on Halcion.

Before he died unexpectedly a few years ago, my friend David Aaron Clark loaned me his copy of "The Bedroom" (not to be confused with "In The Bedroom"). Clark, a renowned director of Asian-flavored porn, also left me hanging with his cheery first-season box set of "Millennium."

Hisayasu Satō's low-budget "pink film" (sexploitation movies made in the declining days of Japan's studio system) from 1992 is bleak, and the bleakness pervades even Kyoko's Halcion dreams. She begins faking her sleep—not taking the drugs—so she can feel something in the Sleeping Room.

Meanwhile some sleepers are being murdered, and Kyoko begins to suspect her own charming husband. A cameo is made by Issei Sagawa as the owner of the sleeping club. Institutionalized for killing and cannibalizing a woman in the early 1980's, Sagawa adds just the right amount of creepy star power to this film.

More recent films like "Human Centipede" match "The Bedroom"'s bleakness, and Emily Browning's "Sleeping Beauty" certainly lifted the High-End Sex With The Drugged Club idea (and fulfilled the promise broken by "Sucker Punch"), but there's something less polished, more lonely, and despairing about the Japanese film that makes it a great date movie.

· Watch "The Bedroom" (zimbo.com)