Vampire Wars

Summary: >

Kuki is a guy in France who makes his his living doing freelance work, mainly with his fists or his guns. In an odd turn of events Kuki finds he has become embroiled with some sort of plot involving the CIA and a secret project no one seems to know much about under the code name Dracula. The French aren't too happy about the CIA running amok in Paris, and want Kuki to figure out what's going on.

Aside from mysterious attacks that suggest vampires, this all leads to a girl named Muraki who was once a pop star. Kuki manages to save the girl from a vampire, they take her to a safe house and then they find out she's not really human. Kuki tries to get answers from various people, ends up doing an assault on the French intelligence agency, then Muraki gets kidnapped by the CIA who intend to take her on a B-52 bomber back to the U.S.

Oh, this just in: vampires are from outer space.

Kuki teams up with these space faring vampires to attack the American's at the airport. You may wonder how many years of training it would take for two guys with fully automatic weapons shooting at a guy coming strait at them on a motorcycle (even driving right between them) to miss every shot, and I can assure you it's a lot. Kuki makes it on the plane but is discovered. Just before he's going to be tossed off the plane Muraki discovers she has super powers and kills people and mind controls the pilots. They then decide to set course for Transylvania to wake the vampire king from space.

I suppose you were expecting an ending. No it stops there. Just be thankful it's over.

Thoughts: >

This OVA is amazing because it's so bad on so many levels... including levels which probably didn't exist before and this title invented them just to suck at that too. I guess I could go into the normal stuff. Terrible designs, bad story, lobotomized plot, cheap music. Yeah, that's all horrible, but that's standard stuff. As I said, Vampire Wars is bad on a whole other level.

Where this became interesting is the perfect storm in bad dubbing. Much of it takes place in France. I know what you're thinking: take the worst anime dubbing you've ever heard, then give them bad French accents. *shiver* It's even worse than that. To make this more "extreme" they decided to pepper profanity all over. But magic sprinkles of swearing aside, the dialog is so hilariously bad you have to think about why someone would EVER come up with lines like that. When a guy is strapped to a bench we actually hear "Sorry if I don't shake your hand, you seem to be tied up right now." I wish I were making that up. If this weren't bad enough, you also have the agonizing death throw groans and dialogs. In particular I liked how one guy literally gets shot about 30 times with a machine gun, but can still talk before he dies... and wait for it... Ghhhaaaaaaahhhghgh!

Before I get into the story, Vampire Wars is also stupid in ways you wonder if they slipped it in just to see if you were paying attention. During one scene a bunch of guys get shot, but despite having bullets hitting their bodies you hear a ricochet with every shot. Actually don't even start on the shooting aspects. It doesn't matter how many bullets are flying in Kuki's direction, they aren't even close. From his perspective though, he can jump from a helicopter 40 feet in the air, shooting a machine gun from the hip and take out a gang of guys during the fall and not miss a single shot.

The story was something else. If you ever see a discussion about Vampire Wars, you might get a paragraph description, but most don't even try to tell you what Vampire Wars is about. It's because it's put together so badly it's hard to describe. If you took parts from every cliche bad action plot from the 80's, then cut them up and reassembled them in random order you could very well come up with this anime. The plot is like a connect the dots picture that isn't numbered and then the dots are all connected completely wrong. Then not satisfied with how bad that was, added some more dots and connected those wrong too. Vampire wars is a 52 minute anime, and no joke; they drop this vampires are from outer space thing on you 40 minutes in. Out of all the stupid things, it's not even conclusive. They drop in irrelevant plot elements everywhere else, why not tie up the ending? Were they worried about the ending being bad or incoherent like absolutely everything else in this show? It's mind boggling.

I wondered why this anime even made it to America, but then I remembered that it was released by U.S. Manga Corps. - the company obsessed with blood and guts flying everywhere no matter how terrible every thing else about it is. Need proof? Vampire Wars. You know it's going to be terrible within the first minute and you'll spend every minute thereafter wondering if maybe, just maybe there will be a part of this anime that isn't bad. When otaku go to hell the only TV station will show Vampire Wars 24/7. That's a compelling reason to pray for redemption.

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