Equal parts atmosphere-drenched horror, Gothic romance, surrealistic sci-fi and mutated spaghetti western — and all filtered through the distinctive brand of Japanese animation known as anime — Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is one of those movies that simply must be seen to be believed. On paper, or describing VHD:B to someone who hasn't seen it, the film must surely sound like a mess. Amazingly enough, it's not. All of the disparate elements joined at the hip in director Yoshiaki Kawajiri's animated fantasy simply shouldn't hang together. And yet they do, in style. More to the point, because of style.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is an anime that should impress even those who don't generally have much use for the genre. Horror movie fans are likely to admire the film most of all, as every frame of VHD:B is steeped in the sort of foreboding yet lushly seductive atmosphere that graced the elegantly eerie Euro-shockers of maestro Mario Bava and his followers. Shadows not only take on a life of their own in Kawajiri's deliciously dark anime, you might say they're the main characters in the film.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is based on characters and storylines introduced in a series of 23 (so far) best-selling novels by legendary Japanese sci-fi writer Hideyuki Kikuchi. That same source material inspired a feature film in 1985 (called simply Vampire Hunter D), although there's no real need to have seen the original to appreciate the new D — a movie which should in almost no way be considered a sequel.
The story takes place in a distant, post-apocalyptic future, where a vanishing but still powerful race of vampires co-exists uneasily with a fearful human population, and groups of morally flexible mercenaries make their livings by engaging in search and destroy missions for thirsty bloodsuckers. One of these bounty hunters is a mystery man known simply as D — a single initial that conjures up both his actual name, Dunpeal, and that of his most notorious ancestor, Dracula.
Dunpeal, as it turns out, is a half-human, half-vampire hybrid, and none too happy about it. With the powers and strength of his vampire father and the troubled conscience of his human mother, D is a classically conflicted antihero who has devoted his life to wiping out bloodsuckers, just as he wages an eternal struggle with the dark, vampiric tendencies within himself.
If D sounds a bit familiar, you might just be thinking of another, closer-to-home human-vampire vigilante by the name of Blade. You may as well throw Richard Matheson's famous sci-fi novel I Am Legend into that mix, since it's the source for both the Charlton Heston character in The Omega Man and the Vincent Price character in The Last Man on Earth. D recalls them all, and with more than a touch of Sergio Leone's Man with No Name as well, as he casts his steely eyed gaze over the countryside, speaking infrequently, and then only in a regulation Clint Eastwood whispered monotone.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust really isn't about D, though; nor is about any of the other characters or the wisp of a story (in which D and a rival band of bounty hunters engage in a series of attempts to rescue a human female kidnapped by a vampire). What VHD:B is really about are twisted landscapes of the night; of pitch black necropolises covered with miles and miles of massive iron crosses for as far as the eye can see (the protective crosses are only part of the bizarrely fascinating conflation of Christian folklore and Buddhist iconology going on here). It's about characters leaping on horseback over herds of gigantic, flying manta rays; snarling werewolf henchmen with extra faces growing out of their abdomens; haunted castles transforming into high-tech rocket ships aimed for the stars; and the thoroughly surreal spectacle of beautiful but deadly beams of light issuing from massive eyeballs floating high in the sky.
In other worlds, this visually spectacular D is about pure imagination, about mood and more mood, and about one incredible sight after another. Alternately brooding and frenzied, claustrophobic and grandly proportioned, this often violent and always stylish feature establishes its uniquely creepy universe from its very first frames and then pulls us deeper and deeper into the darkness. The movie blithely throws in everything from Mad Max-style road warriors to George Romero-esque zombies to gravity-defying, Crouching Tiger air ballets, in a post-pomo mishmash that seems to succeed through sheer force of will alone (well, that and a boatload of technical chops).
On the downside, there's very little dramatic momentum here, much less tension or even logic — just the inscrutable Dunpeal and company moving through the film's extraordinary settings. The movie's narrative weakness is exacerbated by the generic voice talent behind too many of the characters, most of whom deliver their lines without the slightest hint of nuance. Almost as if the actors were being directed by someone with an imperfect grasp of English (which is, after all, a possibility), the voices we hear often come off as near-spoofs of whatever it is they're actually trying to project; D's lines frequently seem flat, rather than enigmatic, while many of the other voice actors seem to be trying way too hard to infuse their characters with what they hope will pass for colorful eccentricity. It doesn't help that the dialogue has a tendency to get a bit silly as well. Then again, like the character of D himself, this is a movie that's at its best when it keeps its mouth shut.
When the characters are silently going about their business, dwarfed by the shadowy, intricately detailed landscapes — which is the usual state of affairs in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust — the movie can be curiously effective, even hypnotic. D himself looks like a tragic-romantic cross between a medieval pilgrim, a musketeer and a modern ballet dancer. He sports long, flowing locks, billowing around sharp but perfectly symmetrical features and absurdly large doe-eyes, an effect that makes him look like he just stepped out of this week's boy band or a sheet of doodles by an 8-year-old girl. He's a pure expression of anime at its most stylized, and, like the rest of the movie, is best taken with at least a couple of grains of salt. Apply that salt generously and prepare for a memorable ride on the D Train.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2001.