The only great thing about the first-ever animated Castlevania TV series is how it ends: with a taste of a promising follow-up. The new Netflix "series," which is technically an 80-minute movie broken up into four chunks, concludes with everything you would want from such a video game-inspired show. Vampires. Demons. Whips. Magic. Action.

But the series' journey to that point is so tiring and burdensome that this tiny four-episode series still feels too long.

Dracula takes a different type of bite

























Castlevania's trouble begins with an entire first episode dedicated to Dracula. We stumble upon the world's most famous vampire at the moment he decides to fall in love—and with a lowly human, at that. This setup flounders thanks to an unconvincing plea from a woman named Lisa who mistakes Drac for a scientific expert. She wants to heal her town's ailing populace, and Drac decides, "Sure, I'll bite." (Or, in this case, not bite.)

One screen-wipe later, we see the fruits of Lisa's labor: she's been branded a witch by her town's clergy and burnt at the stake. This is sold to viewers by long, sweeping shots of men of the cloth. We see all bathed in flickering red tones, while they loudly and lengthily proclaim the good they're doing by burning this woman to death. The scene drags and drags and drags—just in case you missed that somebody in the production crew has a serious beef with organized religion. Dracula eventually appears, threatens the populace for killing his only beloved, and gives them a year's warning to flee or face punishment.

We immediately see a "one year later" proclamation of bravado from a church leader, mocking Dracula's empty threat, which Drac responds to by sending an army of demons to the town. This is a pretty non-action episode, and although the demon swarm is incredibly brief, Castlevania's producers decide that this is a good time to draw some exploded bodies and detailed entrails. It's an unearned moment of hand-drawn gore, and it's followed up by the introduction of series hero and whip-snapper Trevor Belmont. We seem him as a sad drunk at a bar where the patrons talk at length, with great detail and vulgarity, about a man who was caught having sex with a goat.

To review: the first episode begins with an overlong, slow Dracula love story meant to sell us on the idea that, hey, the vampire's gore-filled rampage is kind of justified, then ends with the Castlevania series' trademark dollop of bestiality. (For the uninitiated: That's sarcasm.)

The episode does show off the serious set-design chops of the Castlevania crew, but these are stymied by low-grade animation that suffers from awful lip-sync work (with mouths moving even when people aren't talking).

Wait, how do you want them to bleed?

The rest of the series takes far too long to set Belmont up as a legendary vampire hunter. Clearly, this cartoon version of Castlevania wants to build a story of a lost and dark anti-hero who earns his way back into the good guy fold, but veteran comics writer Warren Ellis fumbles this archetypal story in a spectacular fashion. Belmont spends most of the series shrugging at the cries of innocent people, beating up moronic drunks, and relishing his few brief pot-shots at corrupt bishops. For a full two episodes, he reads like a less likable, more dour Han Solo.

Some dialogue or exposition about his family's vampire-hunting legacy, or about the specific trials or losses he faced en route to this depressive spell might have helped the slow series move a little faster. Instead, all we get is Belmont grunting and dropping F-bombs until Ellis notices that time is running out, so—surprise—a single accusation of cowardice turns Belmont into an altruistic badass just in time for a major demon battle.

Game-to-cinema conversions don't have much of a bar to clear (thanks, Uwe Boll), and Castlevania jumps that gap with solid voice acting from Richard Armitage as Trevor and James Callis (Battlestar Galactica) in his very, very brief turn as Dracula's son Alucard. The 3-4 minutes of whip-wielding monster combat we see in the entire series is exactly what any kid from the '80s would have imagined a cartoon Castlevania battle might look like.

But Castlevania spends too much time developing a paper-thin plot that only needs a few paragraphs to sum up. For all the time we spend with Belmont, we learn nary a thing about him, nor about the mysterious "Speakers" organization who he eventually allies with. And the dialogue is—well, let me quote a rant from the overlong bar-fight scene at the start of the second episode: "You came from shit. I came from shit. We all came from shit!"

That about sums it up. (This fight ends, by the way, with Trevor shouting at the drunkards that he hopes they die in a very Don Hertzfeldtian fashion.)

Castlevania feels like neither an incredible video game sequence nor like a fully earned, backstory-heavy companion to the classic vampire-hunting adventures. There is certainly enough enjoyable stuff here—cheesy, laughable dialogue, whip-wielding action, and gorgeous artwork—to be edited down to a single episode. I wish Netflix recognized that, because the season ends with three mysterious heroes (maybe) about whom I want to know more: Belmont, whose family legacy is still unclear; Sypha Belnades, the magic-casting female badass who lights up the few scenes she's in this season; and Alucard, whose brief hint of "bad guy with a hint of goodness" appeal is well-captured by his voice actor.

Instead, we get an overlong excommunication of some producer's Catholic school hangups and an unnecessary dive into bad language and out-of-nowhere gore. If you're really eager for an animated series in which terrified people deal with an implacable scourge of monstrous evil, you're almost certainly better off with Attack On Titan. Meanwhile, I hope Castlevania's already-greenlit second season will learn from these few episodes' mistakes, which foul up what could have been a much better game translation.