Dracula, Sovereign of the Damned

Dracula, Sovereign of the Damned is an anime from Toei Studios, dating from 1980, based on Marvel's Tomb of Dracula comic. Marvel's Dracula once tried to kidnap Storm until Kitty Pryde showed up and drove his blood-sucking butt out the window wielding the Star of David. Apparently, Dracula is anti-Zionist.

Bit of a snark, but it was a great interlude during the Claremont era of X-Men. I've never read Tomb of Dracula (or haven't got around to it yet), but the anime adaptation is infectiously good, although a little primitive in the animation and stiff in the look. It's rather conventional anime; the images don't move fluidly. The film looks its age. Apparently, it hasn't been remastered or upscaled or whatever AI can do to the Living Vampire to resurrect his sad, sordid saga for modern audiences.

Dracula, Sovereign has Drac introduced by way of his former life as Vlad Tepes, in a castle out in old Transylvania. BUT the action moves to Boston, I believe (if I remember correctly), and a Satanic cult doing Satanic stuff that kids should probably not be exposed to in a cartoon video. But I doubt this one is exactly aimed at the wee little ones.

The cult invokes Satan, but for some reason gets Dracula, who marries their sacrificial bride Dolores, who has a baby named Janus who later runs around in some superhero tights and has all-white creepo eyes, and is an emissary of Heaven. He turns into a dove (I think) from time to time.

But Janus dies as a baby, so it is only the Holy Will that brings him back from beyond to try and end the evil reign of Daddy Drac, who begins a Jack the Ripper stalk-and-suck spree in Boston, while his great-great-great-great (how many greats?) grandson or somesuch, Frank Dracula, is recruited by Hans Harker (a wheelchair-riding Van Helsing type), and a girl out of a micro horror RPG game with a crossbow or something. I can't remember her name, but it seems she might have been represented as the literal descendant of Van Helsing.

Frank Dracula is a martial arts expert straight out of an old issue of Shonen Jump. They all go a-hunting for vampire ass, and Dolores, the Bride-to-Be of Lord Satan, gets whisked to Hell along with Drac himself, who is unceremoniously stripped of his vamping privileges and ends up in a cemetery with a bunch of ghouls as they rise.

And rise.

And rise.

It's a great little animated film, a lot of bloody good fun (no pun), with probably a few subtexts we could plumb if we could remember any of them. Dolores (in some versions Domini) is the Bride of Death, Satan, but she seems a perfectly ordinary and reasonable young lady, notwithstanding. The whole thing seems to be set in the context of the eternal cosmic struggle between good and evil. Janus, of course, is a reference to the “two-faced” god, who looks upon good and evil, as he is an emissary of God but is of the bloodline of the undead evil of Daddy Drac. His mother, pure and virginal but unaccountably tasked with marrying first the Devil and then Dracula, comes across as long-suffering and pitiable.

At the end, we have Toro, a strange character that also erupts from the dirt of the cemetery to battle a Dracula now denuded of his mystic, monstrous gifts. We proceed to a zombie siege of a house occupied by three children. An amazing spiritual shift is utilized, and the film has even been called, perhaps a little hysterically, “blasphemous.”

Blasphemous or not, Dracula, Sovereign of the Damned is an entertaining ride, past the Borgo Pass and straight to the animated alleyways and towering temples to Satan that Boston, Marvel Comics, and Toei Animation belch forth.

Dracula - Sovereign of the Damned (1980), Remastered video with English audio

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