Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

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Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
Directed by	Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Written by	Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Starring	Andrew Philpot, Wendee Lee, John Rafter Lee, Michael McShane, Pamela Adlon, John Di Maggio
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Urban Vision Entertainment
Release date(s)	2000-08-25
Running time	102 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	English
Preceded by	Vampire Hunter D (1985 film)
IMDb profile

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (バンパイアハンターD) is a 2000 Japanese anime film, written and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, with characters designed by Yutaka Minowa. It is the sequel to 1985's Vampire Hunter D, and is based on the third of Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D manga novels (titled Demon Deathchase in English).

Contents 1 Characters 2 Plot 3 Differences Between the Novel and the Movie 4 Trivia 5 External links

[edit] Characters

• D: The protagonist of the movie, he was hired by the father of a young human woman named Charlotte after her abduction by count Meier Link. D is a dhampir, with a dark charisma; he is the son of Count Dracula and a human female, and possesses amazing powers and abilities that help him in his profession as a vampire hunter.

• Count Meier Link: The antagonist, he abducted Charlotte for reasons unknown in the beginning, however, as the events progress, his motives become clear. He gained the respect (and loathing) of both vampires and humans alike as he does not kill without being provoked. Link has powers beyond of a vampire of his age, including full regeneration from mortal wounds and a presence that deforms crucifixes, crack mirrors, and wilts plants.

• The Marcus Brothers: A group of five vampire hunters hired by Charlotte’s older brother for backup, they consist of four brothers and one (though not blood-related) sister. They compete with D throughout the movie to rescue Charlotte from Link. The brothers are:
  • Borgoff: The leader of the group, bites cigars and has a bossy demeanor. He wields a repeating crossbow on his right arm, which is capable of launching hundreds of silver arrows at its target.
  • Nolt: A huge-bodied man who uses an enormous war hammer with a silver tip at one end.
  • Kyle: Fights with a pair of boomerang-like blades that turn into crosses and spin on his fingertips; he usually throws wisecracking insults.
  • Grove: The fourth brother, he is bed-ridden and is capable of astral projecting his soul and dealing massive psychic attacks after receiving a special injection. In the movie, Grove is very close to Leila and some speculate that he might be romantically involved with her.
  • Leila: Conspicuous as the sole woman of the group, although she is not related by blood to the Marcus Brothers, they consider her their little sister. She fights using a small, yet very powerful gun. Leila joined the Marcus Brothers to avenge her parents, who were killed by vampires when she was a child.

• Charlotte:A young human woman who was abducted by Link. Her father hires D to find her and bring her home, but makes a provision in their contract for D to humanely kill her if she has become a vampire.

[edit] Plot

Charlotte, a young human girl is abducted by Count Meier Link, a vampire nobleman who is known to not harm humans needlessly. Charlotte’s father hires D to find her and kill her humanely if she turns into a vampire. At the same time, her older brother also hires the notorious Marcus brothers for backup.

The two parties (D and the Marcus brothers) race inexorably after Link. However, Link hires the Mutant Barbarois; a group of lethal mercenary body guards. They consist of Caroline, a shape shifter; Benge, a shadow manipulator; and Mashira, a werewolf. As the story progresses, Link’s abduction turns out to be an escape by he and Charlotte, as they are lovers. Through the journey, D talks to Leila and tells her that she can have a life that someone like him could never have, the life of a normal human. They make a pact, if either one of them survives, the survivor can bring flowers to the other's grave. Near the end of the movie, Link goes with Charlotte to the Castle of Chaythe, where Countess Carmila, Link’s patron, waits for them. Carmila, a ghost of a vampire who died long ago, reigned supreme within the Castle of Chaythe when vampires were all-powerful and unchallenged. However, her bloodlust was so strong that Count Dracula, D’s father, killed her in disgust. It turns out that D’s reasons were not monetary and that his main reason for preventing their marriage is to stop them from bringing another dhampir into the world. After going to the Castle of Chaythe, D fights Carmila, who plotted to kill Charlotte and return to life. D, along with Leila, let Link and Charlotte leave and live on their own.

In the final scene of the movie, D arrives at Leila’s funeral, watching from a distance. Leila’s granddaughter greets him and invites him to stay with them for a while. D declines, saying that he simply came to “repay a favor to an old friend, who feared no one would mourn her death.” The girl thanks him, and D replies by smiling gently at her, and leaves.

[edit] Differences Between the Novel and the Movie

The novel is both more violent and bleaker than the film; what it lacks in the movie's sympathetic character development, it replaces with greater background detail—both for the world, and the story setup. The book focuses on the Marcus family, not D, and is far less charitable to them. They are reduced to amoral thugs. All of them show some form of genetic enhancements bordering on mutations, allowing them supernatural physical skills.

Leila, the only daughter in the Marcus Clan, is described as having predatory cat-like eyes. Although she is given superhuman prowess with mechanical objects—particularly vehicles—far exceeding her brothers', she is repeatedly victimized by them. Novel Leila is younger than movie Leila, with long hair rather than a utilitarian butch cut, and physically no match for her brothers, being small and lithe. She is the victim of forced incest, all of her brothers violating her when she attempts to settle down with a suitor, which makes her become colder and crueler as a Vampire Hunter, although Kikuchi fails to explore her reactions to this event. In the movie, the Marcus Brothers are cold-blooded, hard-nosed hunters, but nevertheless fond of their adopted little sister.

The four brothers are also quite different. Borgoff, the largest, is often referred to as a "granite statue with whiskers" and shows a lack of intellect, often described as having expressions bordering on moronic. His bow is primitive (merely a stick with a string attached, the arrows just metal darts). He dies gruesomely, devoured by flesh-eating ants, when a trap set for Mayerling (Meier Link in the film) turns against him. Although not turned into a vampire, Borgoff is possessed by Mashira, and fulfills a similar role of threatening the characters in the climax. Borgoff also possesses strange psychic abilities and genetic enhancements, including a form of projected remote viewing and weightless running.

Nolt is far smaller than his movie self, without a tattoo. (Crosses are not used in the books but remain a part of the iconography of the movies). His staff grows and changes length with the swing. Also he is killed by D, not Bengé, when he tries to finish him off after D is blasted into a river by Borgoff.

Kyle wears black, and his weapon is just a crescent moon boomerang blade on a string, similar to Rei Ginsei's in book one. He shows a fondness for Leila, but rapes her to provoke Grove into a seizure. He is turned into a vampire slave by Caroline and is killed by Borgoff when he gives his change away by light sensitivity.

Grove (also Groveck) is bitter and selfish in the book, but softens when placed into a protective/romantic encounter with the nameless Girl (movie Charlotte). He is featured more prominently in the book, as opposed to his brief appearances in the movie. Instead of dying nobly to save his beloved sister from a zombie Borgoff, he is butchered when Borgoff tapes a small bomb to him to trigger one last psychic attack.

The opening setup is entirely different, with the Marcus clan first arriving at the dead zombie-ridden town to meet the last inhabitant with some human faculties left—the girl's father, who addresses the unseen D instead with his plea to rescue his abducted daughter. Throughout the entire book, her name is never given. She has few lines and fulfills a barely sketched role, whereas in the movie, Charlotte is an active character, who speaks on her own behalf. In the novel, the nameless girl is endangered by sexual assault twice: once by Mashira, and again by a nameless lascivious huntsman. However, the condition of the dead town is more thoroughly explained in the novel.

The three Barbarois bodyguards are significantly different in the novel. Instead of mutants, they are the descendants of a variety of halfbreed demons, indebted to Dracula, who appears in their past as a savior.

Bengé, while still a trickster, is completely black and unnaturally slim, as opposed to having kabuki-like white face and hands in the movie adaption. He still crafts illusions, but never ensnares D with the movie's dramatic time-space warping trap (an element apparently borrowed from the second novel). His death is almost identical, as he attempts to attack both Borgoff and Kyle. Caroline and Mashira both show disgust with his antics and modus operandi.

In the novel, Caroline is a bizarrely powerful dhampir, though her origins are vague. Rather than controlling substances through bonding with them, she can turn anything she bites into an "undead slave" by drinking its lifeblood: here, a mechanical arm's fuel or a tree's sap. Blonde and voluptuous, a siren rather than a feral, green-haired mutant, Caroline continually wears a dress, emphasizing her use of proxies in battle rather than her own efforts. Her powers lead to an exploration of the world's history, when she possesses the remaining piece of a long-dead, gigantic machine race who independently achieved sentience and fought ancient ideological wars observed by the Nobles.

The book's tragedies ensue from the lusts of both the Marcus Clan and the hired bodyguards—as Caroline plots with Mashira to separate the human and vampire couple. She seduces and turns Kyle, then bites Leila while D lies prone under the dirt, the battle ending in a stalemate. Leila succeeds in resisting Caroline's bloodcall, managing to kill her in the last scene.

Mashira is not the noble young bodyguard who acts with gentle consideration toward Charlotte as in the movie, but a lascivious traitor bent on raping her. He is not a mutated werewolf but a parasite like Left Hand, inhabiting the stolen body of a middle-aged man. Much about the nature of Left Hand's race is revealed in dealing with him, implying that D and Left Hand share a unique bond, as Left Hand's mind and will have not dominated D.

Very little of this novel is written from D's viewpoint, and the movie's theme of overcoming racism and xenophobia, highlighted in the relationship between Leila and D, is never addressed in the novel. The novel Leila is rescued several times by D, and shows evident love for him, rather than the platonic respect for a fellow hunter she demonstrates in the movie. The movie's prime characterization scene, where they both talk while D recuperates, never happens in the novel; D remains unconscious while Leila defends him from Caroline, receiving grave injuries in the process. The town scene where D encounters an old man he once rescued as a child also exists only in the movie.

The name Meier Link is phonetically close to the version originally used in the novel (マイエルリンク —literally Maierurinku, Maierlink); it was split into two words for the movie. However, the novel version of the name is the standard Japanese rendering of the geographical name Mayerling, and for the English translation Kevin Leahy chose to use a transliteration faithful to the origin of the word rather than a close phonetic adaptation. Novel Mayerling's character is similar, but given less focus; his relationship with the lovestruck nameless girl is very hierarchical, although more detail is given on their meeting and the girl's "abduction".

The ending is markedly different from the movie, and comes suddenly. Instead of Chaythe, the ruined spaceport of Claybourne awaits the ill-fated lovers; but when they arrive, the rockets are completely ruined. D and Mayerling face off, with D mysteriously sparing his opponent at the last minute. Mayerling is killed by the possessed Borgoff, and the girl then commits suicide on his claw.

D and Leila leave without much commentary; he pays a man to bury the lovers, and still has a characteristic smile in the end, but it's for Leila, who leaves to find the man who offered to marry her a few years ago.

[edit] Trivia

• Carmila of Bloodlust does not appear in the novels, and is based in part upon the fictional Carmilla and in part upon the historical Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Báthory.

• In the English trailer for Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the voice-over was done by Michael McConnohie, who voiced D in the first film.

• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust was ranked 7th of overall DVD sales for 2002 according to Nielsen VideoScan.

• The word dunpeal is one possible Latin transliteration for how a Japanese person would write the word dhampir.

• The movie Blade 2 was going to be called Bloodlust. By coincidence, the original Blade: Trinity script was to take place in a post-apocalyptic future where the world is reverted to the same feudalistic society featured in D.

• It should be noted that despite popular belief, a Japanese dub to the movie does exist, with Tanaka Hideyuki as D with Yamadera Kouichi as Meierlink. The Japanese version has some differences from the English version, most noticeably in style and script. The Japanese version makes a few direct quotes from the novels—for example, at Leila's funeral the priest is reciting a poem from the sixth novel. Interestingly, in the Japanese dub the Left Hand gives Carmila's full name as Carmila Báthory.

[edit] External links

• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust Official Website
• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust at the Internet Movie Database
• Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust at Anime News Network