Hellsing

Synopsis:

As an officer of Division 11, Seras Victoria was assigned to investigate the mysterious happenings in Cheddar Village. Shortly upon arrival her team was overcome by ghouls and she alone remained the sole-survivor of the attack. After a few moments though her fallen comrades rose from thier deathbed as ghouls themselves and turned their blood-lust towards Seras. Unable to pull the trigger on her once former friends she turns and runs into the forest without looking where she is going as long as she can distance herself from the monstrosities that remind her of people she once knew. After running for a bit Seras comes to an opening in the forest with a cemetery and a church behind it. Looking for shelter she runs inside church only to find that the priest that resides within is actually a vampire that created the ghouls in the village. Seras is quickly overpowered but before she is killed a man dressed in red and wearing sunglasses appears from no where and attacks the vampiric priest but before he is bested in combat the priest takes Seras hostage and threatens to kill her. With only one option, Seras allows the man in red to shoot the priest having the bullet go through her and into her antagonist as she learns the bullets are actually created from blessed silver crucifixes that were melted down into ammunition. With this the priest is killed but Seras also feels her own life fading away as blood flows from the huge gaping wound in her, the man in red kneels down next to her and tells her his name is Alucard and she realizes he is also a vampire and he offers her a choice... die as she is or allow Alucard to mix his blood with hers and continue the fight against the undead. Not wanting to let her friends die in vein she makes her choice as Alucard bites her neck... Seras is then employed by the Hellsing corporation that Alucard works for and fights against vampire uprisings throughout the world.

Reviewer: Endosanity
Number of episodes watched: 13

Review:

I gotta tell you, I normally dislike vampire stories since I find that particular "monster" to be highly over-rated. But here we have a new spin on things, we have an extremely powerful vampire Alucard (spell it backwards) being kept by humans in a secret organization that is bent on exterminating vampires in general. But you find that Alucard loves his job because he can't stand "instant freaks" like teenage vampires that live for the moment as they only piss him off so he stays with the Hellsing family always looking for powerful opponents and will never betray his keepers for some unexplained reason. This made the show highly enjoyable and I was hanging on every episode as I wanted to know more about Alucard and why he is being kept by humans and the somewhat comic relief being supplied by Seras as she learns to deal with her new vampiric state helped lighten the mood at times. The integration of vampires among humans is portrayed extremely well and how you learn that the old school vampires dislike of the modern vampire and it's lack of disregard for the elders, this was probably my favorite aspect of the whole series.

Even though the animation was pretty average, the remarkable story and intriguing characters supersede that in every way. From the Hellsing families' leader Sir Integra (It's a woman, I never got why she is referred to as sir...) to Alucard and Seras you are given some extreme character depth which is done very well for a 13 episode run and you almost feel bad when the Hellsing organization is given a bad reputation for anything. You'll be cheering on Alucard and chuckling while Seras learns to accept her new life that was granted by Alucard, it's a fantastic series and I recommend it.

Hellsing (opening)

Recommendation: |Above Average|

Media type: DVD
From: Geneon
Languages: English;Japanese
Subtitles: English