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 1985 Toyoo Ashida film Vampire Hunter D. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2000 Yoshiaki Kawajiri film, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is an exercise in how better-looking and higher budget doesn’t always mean a better picture.
And it does look better; this offering was designed for theatrical release and American attention instead of the TV-grade budgeting the 1985 film got, so the animation remains kinetic and smooth while they get to travel a whole lot more, with a bunch of different settings and characters, rather than being confined to a homestead, a castle, and one or two visits to a town like in the original OVA. There are a lot more tendrils and tentacle-like attacks — shadows, capes, vines, spikes, liquid metal, and so on — than blasts and beams this time around, with the commensurate allocation of more animation resources to those things. And yet. And yet.
Our story is as follows: The vampire Meier Link has absconded with the beautiful Charlotte, daughter of a rich and powerful mortal family. The dhampir Vampire Hunter, D, has been hired — along with other mercenaries — to pursue the vampire as he flees with his captive across the desert in his carriage, making for the castle of the vampire queen Carmilla, who has a rocket ship that will take Meier and Charlotte into space and to the City of the Night, an orbital haven for vampires. D jockeys for position with his competition and clashes with Meier and his servants, learning along the way that Charlotte is in love with the vampire and has come with him willingly, and that he in turn loves her. The two lovers arrive at the castle just ahead of D and the remaining mercenaries, and scramble for the spaceship — only to be betrayed by Carmilla, for reasons anyone familiar with the tales of Countess Carmilla Elizabeth Bathory can guess and that Meier Link probably should have flagged when she offered to help him and his beautiful young human mistress because of her belief in the enduring power of love. Carmilla is revealed to be a vampire lich, a master of illusion and phantasm that wants Charlotte’s blood to resurrect her, having been killed many years ago by D’s father, Dracula, for indulging too greedily in her vices and shaming the Nobles’ good names. D and Meier Link defeat Carmilla’s illusions and consign her to permanent oblivion, but too late to save Charlotte. After one final showdown, D lets Meier leave with Charlotte’s body in the spaceship, the vampire getting what he wanted but not how he wanted it, and D returns to Charlotte’s family with her ring as proof of her death.
Not the worst plot in the world. In fact, pretty good! You’ve got some decent themes going on, it’s nice to see some moral complication added to the vampires of this world even if it is the expected complication for the genre, and hey, the movie’s called Bloodlust, so it focused in properly on the villain Carmilla’s bloodlust, right? Well, I’ve played something of a trick: I described the plot as it should be focused and weighted, not as it actually is in the film. Instead of tightly focusing in on D, Meier Link, Charlotte, and Carmilla, Vampire Hunter D spends some sixty percent of its 105 minute run time on the mercenaries — the Marcus brothers and Leila — and the chase across the desert and into the castle that costs all of them their lives.
These characters are boring, rote, and don’t even have great gimmicks; the leader, Borgoff, is a muscle-bound, incredibly jacked, one-eyed dude who for some reason rapid fires silver arrows from an arm crossbow — maybe the least-appropriate weapon possible for his character design — while dead meat redshirts Nolt and Kyle have a sledgehammer and glaive-knives, respectively. The fourth brother, Grove, is the most interesting of the bunch; a bed-ridden, desiccated shell of a man clearly in love with Leila, the vampire-hating, motorcycle-riding bounty hunter babe that’s joined up with the brothers, and who spends his days strapped into a bed in the back of their admittedly-cool train-tank…until the Marcus brothers need to call out the heavy artillery, and then he takes drugs to astral project himself out as, basically, close air support that uses magic missiles to take out anything that moves. We spend so much time on the road with these guys instead of with D, and so much more time doing dopey but expected enemies-to-friends-to-maybe-lovers with Leila and D (before the dhampir shuts down that last bit for good, of course; genre expectations require that he remain celibate and emotionally unavailable to preserve his protagonism). If it is literally your first anime movie as a teenager, that can be fine — the fights and settings along the way are going to leave a much bigger impact on you than the actual character work and story progression, which are respectively boring and nil.
The aesthetic has been refined in the fifteen years between the first OVA and this one; sometimes that’s for the better — anything involving vampires and crosses, for instance, is a lot cooler than it was last time out. The opening scene with Meier Link’s carriage driving through the city up to Charlotte’s window and every cross it passes bending and warping from the strength of his vampire power is excellent. It also doesn’t lend itself to Meier actually being a stand-up dude, and reinforces that this whole deal worked out better with Lee from the 1985 movie — a nearly anhedonic, passive freak who radiated power and evil, was craggier than a cliff face, and spoke in a slow rumble. Meier is too much of a pretty boy, and all that aside, we lose most of that cool high gothic cross aesthetic along with him for the middle part of the movie. Bloodlust is a lot more post-apocalyptic science fiction than the 1985 OVA was, and correspondingly a lot less fantasy; fewer truly weird fantasy creatures mucking about, and a lot more broken down overpasses from the world before. We do get some big flying manta ray guys that treat the sand like water pretty early on, but that’s about it. The colors are all washed out too; gone are the vibrant blues, magentas, deep purples, and bright greens from the eighties — outside of a very brief stopover in an oasis ruin of sorts, everything’s brown, black, harsh white, or dull red. This, again, works for the vampires; even D now wears a full black outfit instead of having a dark blue He-Man or Skeletor underwear-on-the-outside getup under his cape like he did back in the OVA. But man there’s just a lot of desert and drab-colored wreckage in the middle of this film.
The experience wasn’t helped by deciding to watch the English audio this time, instead of finding a version with English subtitles on the Japanese audio, since this was the original audio track and the intended experience for a film that was made for the American market. While the actors are professionals — Peggy from King of the Hill’s VA is Leila; Kyle’s is even today bouncing around police procedurals on actual TV (Alex Fernandez, the only guy who is actually trying in the whole cast), early career John DiMaggio is in here and mid-career Michael McShane is as well — the voice direction is terrible and the script is, well, it’s still a sloppily-translated dub-level script from the late nineties. At no point in the production did anyone catch that “dhampir” had been mistranslated and bastardized as “dunpeal,” or make any attempt to fix it. Andrew Philpot is atrocious as D; limp, monotone and quiet in the way all these terse, near-silent protagonists were directed to be for years and years up until just recently. Surely Doug Cockle didn’t invent bringing intensity and juice to a tough guy role with relatively few formal words when he began voicing Geralt of Rivia; that seems like something that would be intuitive to the material. But D’s passivity is not only obviously intentional, his voice lines seem like they’re mixed down. Dwight Schultz is here doing two incredibly stock anime villain types — Benge, the incredibly manic jester-type who laughs so much he struggles to get his actual lines into the frames of animation provided, and the elder of Barbarois, who speaks in an incredibly rushed old man monotone. They’re aggressively fine. Most everyone here who isn’t outright bad is aggressively fine. A whole lot of these actors would end up as English vocal talent for the Final Fantasy X dub a year later, so imagine a slightly less stilted but also more aimless and less enthusiastic version of that and you understand what the Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust original cast recording is working with.
Still, they nailed the aesthetic, and that aesthetic is really cool, especially once we reach Carmilla’s castle in the last thirty minutes of the movie (it’s malpractice that it takes this long for her to even enter the film). The whole vampiric, gothic rocket ship headed to the vampire space station in orbit underlines again the implication that the vampires are somehow of alien origin, and once again I’m not compelled to look up the lore on that further lest I be disappointed — it works far better as unstated flavor on top of the rest of the aesthetic than it would being told, “Yes, they are aliens, and Dracula was actually the name of their home planet.” Carmilla’s illusions are a very fun gimmick, and license to basically do whatever you want artistically in vistas that are not yet another desert; it would have been nice to have them in the movie sooner! Part of the problem here is that these are fairly strictly based on serialized light novels, and the light novels are dedicated to titrating details about the greater backstory and lore of the world and of D himself out very tightly in the last chapters in order to keep readers coming back for more; but adaptation is an art, and if you have to remove or lengthen or change certain things (like the original material’s much darker interpretation of the Marcus family), then it’s on you to do so in a way that makes good art. I enjoyed my time with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, but in the end, it fell victim to the same cardinal sin as a bunch of the merely-mediocre films we’ve covered so far: a poorly-paced, too-soggy middle.
Next week, we’ll be covering something completely different! More on that later.
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