HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 23
3rd of 6 Asian horror films

I only recently discovered Vampire Hunter D this month, and that particular little slice of horrorlucinogenic deliciousness knocked me for six, so my hopes were insanely high for its belated 2000 sequel. I guess for some reason I was looking forward to the updated animation techniques. But now I think that's one of the very reasons this one doesn't quite hold up to the original.

I shouldn't focus on that, though, because I still fucking loved Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. This particular manga is a heady combination of gothic horror, revisionist western and post-apocalyptic adventure, but this film adds a little 90's-flavoured neo-noir into the mix, with a cast of cool bounty hunters, plus a bit of a weirdly anachronistic New Wave / punk aesthetic. So much of the appeal here is in the way things have been designed and drawn. Japanese anime is at its best when it conjures its own weird version of the uncanny valley - when your visual cortex is frequently tricked into thinking it's seeing something real, or at least three-dimensional, only for you to suddenly realise it's just the way a backdrop has been separated into different sections to give the impression of depth of field, or something like that.

Bloodlust also has a more cohesive story than the original Vampire Hunter D. It just makes a bit more sense, and the characters are better fleshed out and the whole thing is more narratively involving. That's a plus and yet... I can't help but feel some of that mad magic has been lost - that indefinable quality which I tried so clumsily to articulate in my review for that film.

But I'm getting too caught up in the comparison. There's a cornucopia of delights for lovers of stylish goth-toned bloodshed in this film, and I would recommend it to anyone for whom that awkward phrase holds some appeal.

Final thought: this movie contains the single, greatest Gothic castle in movie history. I am 100 per cent convinced of that. If there's such a thing as heaven, then James Whale and Mario Bava are both up there, and this castle is what their heaven looks like. Amazing.