Warren Ellis's Berserk Castlevania
Trevor fucking Belmont is fucking drunk and he fucking walks the fuck around shitty fucking places and fucking kills shit bastard fucks because fucking Dracula fucking unleashed a fucking army of fucking demons from fucking hell when the fucking bastard cunt fuck shits from the fucking church decided it was a good fucking idea to fucking kill Dracula's fucking wife. Premise, plot, and tone all present and accounted for. Warren Ellis, the edge-tastic comic book writer behind titles like Transmetropolitan, wrote the as yet four episode series (a second instalment of eight episodes is in the works) and it shows. Violence and gore are prolific, almost every line of dialogue is laced with profanity, and the humour ranges from bestiality to the scatological. The Mediaeval setting is used to criticise, mock, and otherwise attack organised religion, which is also a recurring theme in Ellis's work.
The series is based on Dracula's Curse, the third game of the main series. To me, the Castlevania games always seemed like goofy monster mashes in terms of their settings and art style, and fairly light-hearted in their overall execution. The "horror" in those games is almost entirely to be inferred, and the challenging action adventure gameplay is always the main draw. This show definitely moves more towards that territory as it goes on, but the general feeling is closer to a watered down, westernised, and on some level even Disneyfied take on the Black Swordsman arc of Kentaro Miura's Berserk manga. Berkserk began publishing around the same time Castlevania III came out, or a little earlier, and matches extreme gore and grotesque supernatural images with rich psychological horror, the latter being an element that is missing from Ellis's script. It's a shame, because initial attempts to humanise Dracula point towards a psychological approach, but this falls by the wayside and we end up with all of the violence and none of the impact.
The art and animation shine in places but the overall direction is uneven. The characters designs are robust and memorable, drawing on anime but retaining a western feel. Action sequences have a kinetic quality with smooth animations and fairly imaginative set pieces. It's not as grimy as it could be; Trevor Belmont is supposedly sleeping rough and wandering the land getting drunk in dive taverns, but aside from some stylised facial stubble he always looks very clean, as does everyone else. This is at odds with the script's coarse dialogue and results in a tonal imbalance where nothing seems quite believable. For this reason the heavy gore also falls flat, and violent on-screen deaths have little impact, seeming like exclamation points at the end of otherwise nondescript sentences.
I think my favourite part of the show is the voice acting itself. While there are some US actors in the cast, it was very refreshing to hear mostly (either natural or very well studied) English and continental European accents. Richard Armitage is particularly good in the lead role of Trevor Belmont, dexterously negotiating and adding weight to the awkward rhythms of sometime cringe-inducingly juvenile swear-laden dialogue. In addition Graham McTavish tries to deliver on the promise of a nuanced Dracula, although the script is not quite there, and an appearance in the finale by James Callis as Dracula's very originally named son Alucard also shows promise. Maybe I'm overstating things a hair because it's a refreshing change to hear extensive British voice talent doing authentic accents in a US animated production, which would normally feature generic North American accents exclusively, but it was really cool to see characters with accents I hear on a daily basis in real life doing cool things with swords and whatnot. Of course, the story is set in Wallachia, so it's about as accurate as using American accents, i.e.: not at all.
The soundtrack is... not terrible I guess? It tries to combine a certain period style (although not Mediaeval) of ecclesiastical choral music with a modern pulsating electronic action movie type score, and it ends up feeling like a chair with random bits of stuff cut off other chairs stuck to it, you can sit in it but you wonder why they bothered attaching things which are neither functional nor aesthetically congruent to it.
In conclusion, Castlevania has a lot of problems. Warren Ellis has a reputation which is not always borne out by his actual work, and his catalogue of respected science fiction, superhero, and mystery writing sits atop a mountain of really dumb and mediocre tripe with very little redeeming value. This is somewhere in the middle, though probably more of the mountain than of the snow resting on the peak. I think the main thing is it doesn't really last long enough to be properly grating, and the parts where it shines can sort of make up for its considerable shortcomings.