Dream (Level 20)

 
Vampire Wars was a 50-minute OVA series animated by Toei Animation in 1990. The anime was licensed in America by Manga Entertainment in the late 1990s, who released it on VHS in 1998 and later on DVD in 2002. Both releases are currently out of print.
 

 Our "hero" conversing with one of his many hookers.

The Plot

A brutal attack on a NASA base in an Arizonan desert by vampires gets the attention of a French freelance agent named Kozaburo Kuki, who thinks the incident may be connected to the corpse of a CIA agent seen floating along the Seine River in Paris. Discovering that an actress named Lamia Vindaw is being targeted by these vampires, Kuki commits himself to the protection of Lamia as he tries learning more about the vampires and their reasons for attacking the NASA base.

Notable Characters (from left to right)

• Kozaburo Kuki- A French freelance agent who is investigating strange happenings connected to a group of vampires and finds himself getting entangled in a complicated plot involving the vampires and government agents who are all after Lamia.
• Lamia Vindaw- A popular actress who discovers that she isn’t human after having medical tests performed on her and comes under the protection of Kuki when she is targeted by vampires and government groups. 
• Mirusha- The leader of a group of vampires trying to abduct Lamia for mysterious reasons.
  

Why It Sucks

Vampire Wars is another example of bad 90s OVA titles made in Japan. The anime has some pretty bad writing in properly laying out its plot and characters.

In the case of characters, just about everyone you meet tends to stick with flat one-dimensional archetypes. Characters barely have much in the way of personality (especially in the case of our deadpan hero Kuki) and any depth they are given is sloppily laid on in whatever scene they are introduced. Scenes where Kuki is supposed to portray himself as heroic, despite the violent, merciless ways in which he dispatches thugs and implied to sleep with prostitutes, is quite laughable and a poor attempt at trying to have the audience sympathize with his shallow character.

 Two baddies about to be slaughtered badly.

The execution of the plot is just as laughable as the pacing to Vampire Wars makes events breeze through quickly and major revelations come across more as sloppy and happening too conveniently. The movie gets in the horrible habit of having events with Kuki happen way too conveniently. For example, Lamia’s mother not only gives biological details on her daughter’s condition to Kuki despite supposedly only being Lamia’s talent agent, but also happens to own and be capable of piloting a helicopter that Kuki uses to fly in and raid an enemy hideout when Lamia gets abducted later in the OVA.

The visuals to Vampire Wars haven’t aged too well as the seemingly realistic style of drawing used for character designs look rather ugly and flat. Also for an OVA series, the animation to Vampire Wars borders from subpar to terrible as a number of action scenes feature stilted and unnatural movements from characters thanks to the title’s low frame rate. It seems too obvious that Toei was working with a limited budget when they animated this.

The English dub to Vampire Wars also does its part to enhance how laughably bad the series is. Made at the Manga Entertainment branch in the UK, the dub for Vampire Wars features some voice actors making poor attempts at delivering French accents and tossing in graphic language not found in many parts of the original Japanese script to the series as Manga was purposely trying to bump up the age rating to appeal to older audiences and make the anime seem more edgy.