Serdar | Genji Press

Now here’s something I would never have expected: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the animated movie version of one of the lesser novels in the Vampire Hunter D series, is not only better than the original book but in some ways better than many of the novels in the series as a whole. The novel in question, Demon Deathchase, was a flashy but fairly thin vehicle for its main character—a half-human, half-vampire hunter of the undead in a vaguely Mad Max-ian far-flung post-collapse future. It was no great shakes as a story, but it wasn’t hard to see how it could lend itself easily to a terrific action film.

That it did. Bloodlust does as expected and for most of its running time uses the book as a springboard for one inspired and eye-popping action sequence after another. Then, at about the three-quarter mark, it surpasses the source material and delivers a surprisingly emotional conclusion—exactly what was missing from the book in the first place. The fact that I didn’t expect them to even try to add such things only made all the more pleasant a surprise; I went in expecting something fairly mindless and got one-upped bigtime.

I’m not sure whether to review a movie like this or explain it. Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims, an outré genre-busting comedy from Japan, gets most of its yuks by turning samurai movie conventions upside-down and inside-out, and then painting them in garish colors. Take Samurai Hip, Sailor-Fuku Chic and Yakuza Cool, dump them into a blender, throw it at a movie screen, and you’d end up with something (vaguely) like this. It ought to have been a work of goony genius, but instead it’s a tiresome hodgepodge that goes on far too long after it’s worn out its welcome.

Even if it was a better movie, it wouldn’t be the sort of thing I could recommend without many caveats. For one, if you’re don’t already have some experience with samurai flicks—to say nothing of the dozen or so other Japanese movie / pop-culture tropes that get strip-mined in this film—most of the jokes are going to sail right over your head at thirty thousand feet. The movie spends at least as much time channel-surfing and gleefully smashing clichés together as it does telling a story, and eventually it runs out of real story and just starts throwing things on the screen and chasing its tail. It falls down about as badly as Samurai Fiction did, another movie which was funnier in theory than it was in practice.