This is one of those films I thought I had seen. I remember hearing about in college or thereabouts. It generated some buzz because it was a very adult animated film with lots of sex and violence. That seemed very unusual to me at the time. I have a vague memory of renting it and watching it, but no actual memories of what the film was about. Watching it yesterday brought back no memories whatsoever.
Which is good as had I remembered any part of it I would not have watched it again. Vampire Hunter D is a bad film. It is poorly animated, the writing is awful. It takes what could be a cool concept and absolutely does nothing with it.
A young woman, Doris Lang, is attacked by Count Mangus Lee, a 10,000-year-old vampire while taking a walk . He lets her go but within a few days, she will turn into a vampire and be forced to marry the Count.
She hires our titular vampire hunter to help kill Count Lee and thus be freed from his spell. D is a human/vampire hybrid (or a Dhampir if you will), his mother having been seduced by a powerful vampire many years ago. He’s also got a symbiote living in his hand. It has a mouth and is quite chatty. It reminded me of the silly animal sidekicks in Disney movies.
He’s super powerful. He agrees to help Doris. He goes on a quest to defeat the Count, encountering a number of grotesque magical creatures along the way. This includes the three sisters – siren-like creatures who turn into snakes and suck the life force out of anyone. There’s also the Count’s son and daughter who are conniving, scheming, and totally at odds with one another. He wants to usurp the Count, she thinks his desire to marry a commoner is ill-advised.
I love a good quest story and there are some interesting ideas here. It is based upon a series of books by Hideyuki Kikuchi and it has that feeling of containing a deep mythology, but the movie botches pretty much all of it.
The biggest failure of the movie lies in the animation. It looks cheap. It looks like those cartoons I used to watch on television after school. Think GI Joe or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Some of the character concepts are interesting – especially that of D who is fitted with a good hat and long cape – but the animation looks sloppy. During action scenes the characters strike a pose while the background turns into a generic set of constantly moving lines. It is meant to denote movement and action, but really it just looks like an easy way for the animators to save a little time and money. Any sense of location and actual movement is lost.
In 2000 they released a sort-of sequel, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. From the trailers, the animation looks much improved. I dig vampires and vampire hunters/slayers so I might give it a shot. It surely will be an improvement over this garbage.
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