 While it started with a bang, the Hellsing TV series ended with more of a whimper. It's a good thing, then, that Hellsing Ultimate has come along, promising to take one of the most promising vampire-based stories of recent years and do it right. Do these first two episodes live up to that promise..?
Episode 1
A vampire and his ghouls have taken over a rural English town - with the local police and military completely unable to cope, Sir Integra Hellsing arrives on the scene to deal with the problem. She's the head of the secretive Hellsing Foundation, an organisation dedicated to defeating the vampire scourge and allowing the UK's citizens to live in peace. In this case, the vampire concerned seems to be a particularly powerful one, and so Integra unleashes her secret weapon - the vampire Arucard, a dracul of incredible power who has somehow been bonded into the service of the Hellsing family. The only survivor of the police operation is officer Victoria Seras, but she's not really going to be considered a survivor for long. Meanwhile, the activities of Hellsing's Protestant Knights draws the attention of the Catholic Church, and they're not happy...
Episode 2
As powerful as he may be, there have been times in Alucard's existence ("life" is hardly the right word) when things simply haven't gone his way, and memories of that kind have a way of weighing on the mind. While he's pondering the past, the Hellsing Organisation has uncovered evidence that the recent vampire outbreaks haven't been random: each vampire killed has had a number of devices implanted in them, recording their action and combat experiences and reporting them back to some unknown central point. Someone is clearly controlling the attacks, and is also using them to gather information about Hellsing's forces - but for what grand reason? Victoria, meanwhile, is discovering the downsides of being a vampire, including (but not limited to) having to sleep in a coffin and drink blood. She's got enough humanty left that such things really don't appeal to her, but her new master is determined that she should embrace her new life as best she can. Of course, with the bad comes the good: her new heavy-calibre anti-Midian weapon. With Hellsing's HQ about to come under heavy attack, she'll be getting to use it soon enough...
I loved the Hellsing TV series while it was still following the manga - and then, around episode 10 or so, the series caught up with the manga and had to resort to creating its own material. It was all downhill from there. Now we're a few years down the line & the manga has (just) reached its conclusion, that shouldn't be a problem anymore, and so we get the series done as it perhaps should have been. It certainly doesn't do any harm that a lavish budget has been given to the OVA, and the results of that are right up front where they should be, on the screen.
Each disc in this set contains one episode, each around the 50-minute mark in length, which moves along at a good, quick pace, with enough action crammed in to easily fill 3 or 4 "normal" episodes - after the initial scenes with Arucard's first appearance and Seras' death and subsequent resurrection as a vampire (Seras has an interesting history with vampires covered here that I don't remember being touched on in the TV series), the story moves on to a second vampire attack (allowing Seras to get into the vampire-killing groove and show off her new gun), the appearance of Father Anderson (a bad-ass priest and Alurcard's would-be nemesis) and, in the second episode, an all-out attack on the Hellsing HQ by the forces of darkness. You certainly can't complain that there's not enough going on.
It's not all deathly serious, either. There are some comedy Seras moments that are great fun to watch, and she fills the female fanservice role just as well as she always did. There's fanservice of another type here, too, if you're a gun fan, as the weaponry used in the series is lovingly detailed to an almost worrying extent.
If there's a failing, it's that there's not really much in the way of real story. The focus of these episodes is firmly on the action, in all its blood-soaked, demonic, weapon-packed glory. That makes it great to watch when your mind is switched off, but if you're looking for something with a little more depth or a detailed plot, you're not going to find it here. There's a pointer dropped at the end of episode two that something may be coming down the line, plotwise, but for this release it's case of simply sitting back and enjoying the mayhem.
Hellsing Ultimate is definitely an experience to watch, and if high levels of gore and action are on your list of priorities then this should keep you thoroughly entertained, although that all comes at the expense of plot - for these episodes that's kept to a minimum. The asking price is higher than we're used to seeing these days (at the revised point of £14.99 for an episode, you're getting about half the running time you'd usually get for that price), but overall this release is thoroughly worth it.
Why are we reviewing two volumes in one go? Manga had originally solicited them as a single "bundle" release, but after the review had been written, this was changed for licensing reasons. So rather than rewrite the review, it's just being posted as-is.
Video clips for this release: Clip 1 | Clip 2 | Clip 3 | Clip 4 | Clip 5 | Clip 6
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