Awakening

Vampire Hunter D

1985

D: Toyoo Ashida

**********

          I have had special place in my heart for Vampire Hunter D since I watched it on Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime on my birthday and was introduced to a whole new frame of reference on how gory a movie can be (it was my first graphic bisection, I believe). It still holds up in many ways. 

          Although the consensus is that the sequel is far superior, I prefer the first movie for its story. Sometimes it’s better to depict a vampire as an evil, dirty old man who just wants to sexually abuse women than to rehabilitate the species while foreshadowing Stolitz in a straight couple. And in this particular vampire, Magnus Lee (Seizo Kato/Jeff Winkless/David Wald) is a type of villain I love: a powerful evil-doer who is bored by his stagnant existence, only clinging to power out of fatalistic habit, one whose closest experience to happiness is a dopamine boost through fleeting carnal pleasure. 

          Such pleasure is apparently only acquired through the occasional fling with human women, whom he finds stupid but fun. In other words, Big Lee is displaying the same attitude a lot of ostensively Christian trads have suddenly adopted on Twitter. This is annoying to his more honorably bigoted daughter L’Armica (Satoko Kitou/Edie Mirman/Brittany Karbowski), who is shocked when he informs her that she was the product of such a union.  This may be subtle repudiation of the in-universe assumption that dhampirs are produced this way since she is a normal vampire, but nobody in the movie seems to appreciate this.

His target this century is Doris Lang (Michie Tomizawa/Barbara Goodson/Luci Christian) a strong-willed farm girl who enlists the help of dhampir vampire hunter D (Kaneto Shiozawa/Michael McConnohie/Jeff Gremillion). They navigate situations involving scheming locals, and D faces off with sexy snake women (Kazuko Yanaga,Yoshiko Sakakibara/Joyce Kurtz/Tiffany Grant) and demons to rescue Doris from Lee’s castle when she is kidnapped by Lee’s charismatic assassin Rei Ginsei (Kazayuki Sogabe/Kerrigan Mahan/Andy McAvin), only for her to get kidnapped again and hypnotized. When Lee pettily refuses to turn Rei into a vampire (with presumably a shot at L'Armica) for his troubles for at least 50 years, the latter saves the life of Doris’ young brother Dan (Keiko Toda/Lara Cody/Shannon Emerick) and attempts to assassinate him, only to have his head blown up by Lee’s telekinesis. When D defeats Lee, the latter dies with the epiphany that his killer was so powerful because he is a descendant of Dracula himself. L’Armica is offered a future, but she chooses to remain in the collapsing castle. D bids Doris and Dan farewell and walks off in sequence that goes on a bit too long.

          The animation and artwork are not nearly as good as in Bloodlust, but I believe it fits the setting better, since Vampire Hunter D is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story and its still emphasizes the sci-fi portion more than the sequel. Also, I’m nostalgic for 80’s aesthetic and the over-the-top character designs. Perhaps Left Hand’s (Ichiro Nagai/Michael McConnohie/Andy McAvin) dig at D’s fashion sense in Bloodlust is his never letting him get away with the time he once attempted to mix navy blue with black. Less charming is the overuse of the shamefully lazy old anime use of striped backgrounds that weebs have no doubt gaslit themselves into thinking is an effective substitute for motion, even if has become validated with good animation as a purposeful style choice in recent years. Some of the gore isn’t quite as detailed as I remember, although the aforementioned head explosion does hold up.  Overall, it’s a good-looking movie, but it has the limitations of a typical anime and some of the cheesiness to go with it. It does adapt to this by making its hero stoical in his mannerisms.

           Tetsuya Komuro’s score is very foreboding and atmospheric, and I prefer it over the bland, but traditional score for the new movie.

           The 1992 dub is surprisingly good for an anime of this type. Mostly passable, it benefits from being more recent than the infamously bad one for Akira. Jeff Winkless is a standout as Magnus Lee in a good way. My biggest complaint is how brazenly obvious it is that Dan is being voiced by a grown woman, which can be contrasted with the Bloodlust’s female lead’s being voiced by someone most known for voicing a boy. One improvement in the 1992 dub is that Golem (George Manley in the 2015 dub) does not annoyingly say “Golem” over and over. There is a more recent dub from 2015 that I have not seen, but I’ve heard it’s an improvement. 

          It’s a fun movie about a stoic, but good-hearted loner hero who slays a classic vampire with plenty of action.

QUOTES

REI: Count Lee wants you now, and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.

DORIS: My brother and Dr. Ferringo. Release them.

REI: Impossible. You see my friends are quite fond of raw meat.

DORIS: If anything happens to them, I’ll bite off my tongue and bleed to death, I swear.

REI: The Count ordered me to bring you to him intact, so you leave me no choice. Stop! Release them immediately! Put your tongue back in your mouth. It’s bad manners. 

MAGNUS LEE: This present stubbornness is quite unbecoming, my dear.

L’ARMICA: Please, father, I beg of you, please reconsider this wedding. The girl is low-born and common. She is not one of us.

MAGNUS LEE: Hear me: this union will be but a brief interlude in the long years of an endless life. Sooner or later I’ll tire of her like all the others. Then I’ll destroy her and when I’m ready find another. That is my right, is it not?

L’ARMICA: ’Til now, but this girl is different somehow, and dangerous. She could destroy the House of Lee.

MAGNUS LEE: No, my dear. I assure you the House of Lee will not be weakened by the inclusion of a commoner in the family. Of that I am certain, because it occurred once before. You see, your mother was not of noble birth, either. 

[L’Armica is shocked] 

MAGNUS LEE: I've lived for almost ten thousand years. Believe me, you have no idea what that means: boredom. Everlasting and hideous boredom. A never ending search for ways to pass the time... and mating with a human female is one of the few I enjoy. Eventually they become tiresome. For in spite of their vitality, they are fundamentally stupid creatures who couldn't survive without the nobility to rule them. Perhaps now you'll understand my wanting to have some fun every thousand years or so?

[D slays a mutant after Left Hand wakes him up]

LEFT HAND: What would you do without me?

[after exploding Rei’s head]

MAGNUS LEE: What a wonderful night this has been! For the first time in one hundred years I haven't been bored once!