Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2000 Yoshiaki Kawajiri film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2000 Hiroyuki Kitakubo film, Blood: The Last Vampire.
This is a bit of an odd one; thankfully shorter than Bloodlust which came out the same year and thus less prone to the problem of a soggy middle section that happens so often in genre films and frankly in narrative media in general — you have a firm beginning and a firm end in mind, and getting from one to the other is usually the biggest problem. Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) comes in at a crisp 48 minutes and feels like a high-budget pilot episode for a television series, which, of course, it essentially was; this film acted as proof of concept for a franchise that would get follow-up manga, anime, video games, and even a live action adaptation. A cursory glance at most of those shows they declined to keep to both the plot and tone of this original, leaning far more heavily into the tropes you’d expect involving anime high school vampire girls with swords. By the beginning of the 2010s, Blood: The Last Vampire was more or less spent as a franchise.
But here and now, it’s pretty great. The animation wears the use of early CGI proudly on its sleeve, even giving 3D CGI director Tokumitsu Kifune front billing along with the traditional art direction in the opening credits. This was in the days before “CGI” had a negative connotation in animation and, to be fair to the project, it uses it quite well for vehicles and light sources, with a washed out old-timey color palette that both communicates “the past” (our story takes place on a US airbase in Japan in 1966) and allows the animation to blend with the computer graphics much more easily. The use of CGI on much of the environment frees up the animators to pay a lot of close, specific attention to the characters, such as the number of distinct animation frames of both the gun and face of Saya’s handler David as he reloads in the middle of the fight in the motor pool before firing at one of the vampire-demon “chiropterans.” They didn’t need to spend that much effort on something most teams would simply skip altogether for budget reasons — both of time and money — but in putting it in there, they communicated that David was both comfortable with his gun and on the edge of panic; a trained and experienced veteran nevertheless not wholly used to the kinds of fights he was getting into now.
The story for the OVA is pretty direct: Saya kills a man on a Tokyo subway train because her American government handlers tell her to; it’s unclear whether or not this man is actually a demon, and this never-resolved question is the only real mystery in the plot. She is told she is to go to Yakota Air Force base in Tokyo where she has been given cover on the base’s high school for American military brats as a prospective incoming student; there is a chiropteran there that needs killing. She discovers there are in fact three — two of them posing as girls her apparent age and slaughtering classmates in the nurse’s office, and a third posing as the madam of a hostess club that panders to American GIs just off the base. The two “girl” demons attack the school nurse; Saya kills one and forces the other to flee, breaking her sword in the process — she leaves to find another from an antique store she saw earlier in the day, and the nurse foolishly chases the chiropteran into the base’s Halloween social. She corners the demon on the dance floor and Saya barges back in to try to save the nurse a second time, only to discover the sword from the antique store is a fake. In a dreamy sequence focusing on the military band playing jazz on stage, the chiropteran forces both outside without anyone in the busy dance hall somehow noticing; Saya drives the beast off with the fake sword anyway and she and the nurse flee to the motor pool. Meanwhile, her support team chases the one remaining chiropteran across the base to meet them at that location. David has located a real replacement sword for Saya and delivers it just in time for her to kill the second of the monsters, and then they chase the fleeing third beast down the airfield as it attempts to hitch a ride on a departing plane. Saya cuts it down and, as it lays dying, feeds it a few drops of her blood; it immediately expires. In the film’s coda, the nurse is being interviewed by people from the American government about what happened; the entire affair has been covered up, but she’s shown a picture of Saya from 1892 labeled VAMPIRE and asked to confirm if this is the same girl.
This iteration of Blood feels very much like a mashup of two big nineties genre hits — the premise of Hellboy meeting the characters and structure of Ghost in the Shell. It never really reaches the heights of either; Saya herself is something of a cipher, cold and professional and simmering with restrained anger that only lashes out when someone mentions Christ or God. There’s not enough time to really get to know anyone, given that it’s paced and structured to come in at around an hour with ad breaks. Outside of one bit of character work where the American handler David buys her a Japanese schoolgirl outfit thinking she’ll need it to fit in and then every American kid in Western slacks or dresses at the school staring at her for being dressed weird, they don’t do any of the stuff you worry about a production doing with, “Actually this girl who looks fourteen? She’s over a hundred years old.”
The lack of flashbacks (thank God) and the use of the civilian school nurse as the viewpoint character for much of the action means there aren’t many chances to explore the setting or the lore or even really what Saya’s whole deal is beyond the obvious — the fact that she’s a vampire that can walk around in broad daylight is something that you have to piece together for yourself by watching her do it, and we never get any talk about or examination of what the “rules” of being a vampire are in this world, how she became one, or why she’s the last one and there’s all these chiropterans around instead now. This is good for the pacing and flow of the movie itself but maybe less so as a pitch for people to become really intrigued about this world and what’s happening in it. And given that a bunch of the Blood franchise material following this liberally reimagines everything about the setting except for the core concept of a vampire girl with a katana who kills demons — by the 2011 anime most all of this government agency and cover-up stuff is gone and she’s a shrine maiden, for instance — it’s possible the people making it didn’t have any of those answers yet either, and constrained the scope of the production accordingly.
If you’re interested in bloody, action-forward demon-hunting anime, this is a good one of those which might leave you wishing there actually were another 12 episodes of TV just like this, like some vampire-themed version of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. And there is an anime, Blood+, that sort of builds on this, but at a glance the vibes are very different; by the time that series picks up in the then-current day, she’s lost her memory and has an adopted family and is a normal high school girl until one day she’s attacked by demons and discovers she’s the chosen one with a special sword and — you understand. Less grimy, more silly costumes, a supporting cast of not-quite-boyfriends and comedy buddies. It is what it is. Maybe one day we’ll give it a look in this column, but not today.
Next week, we’re finally ready to look at the intersection of vampire media and Warhammer 40K; I’ll be watching and reviewing Angels of Death from WarhammerTV, which I go into mostly blind except for knowing it involves the goings-on aboard the Sword of Baal.
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