YES, i’ve heard of this by doing a research on the worst voted/rated shows on AnimeList.
I could have talked about NAMI (no, not that one, not that Nami either, most likely not even your thrid guess), so you decide if you lucked out or not in this occasion.
I’ve held off on covering it because it’s so goddamn obscure and has such infamous reputation… that even finding english fansubs for it was a notable task.
And it figures the only english subbed version i could find around it’s from a group labelling themselves as “BetterThanNothing”, i’m sure even they eventually did so moved by piety, as nobody even wanted to bother making it more available. It’s a rare case of people finding an anime so shit that they don’t even spread awareness by shit-talking it, they figured it was more deserving of wallowing in the dark, unspoken and unheard of, still more valuable than trying to actively focusing a spotlight on it, even if just to trash it for easy views on Youtube and socials.
Can’t say that it was a bad stance to take, in hindsight, this is no Chargeman Ken.
I mean, this is a series that immediatly makes it clear that “this is the story of the Great Detective Holmes, who neither solves mysteries nor makes deductions.”
So it “gets” you by making you wonder what the hell happens into a show that immediatly says “no, see, we don’t do any of what we name ourselves after”.
Glossing over the question if Holmes is even a vampire as the title states is then par for the course, it has some logic. He isn’t, btw.
Deception is one thing, i mean, ATHF was supposedly about a trio of fast food items solving mysteries, but the series itself used the fact that it didn’t stick at all to what it was supposed to do/be, bounced off his own stoner meta attitude.
This i don’t even know, absolutely no clue, because one thing it’s trolling, another to make an entire anime series with the sole point of trolling people via its combo of shitty opening that misrepresents the actual show, the ending also featuring the same generic j-pop love song of the opening and implying stuff that doesn’t actually happen or matter in the actual 2 minutes of show, nonsensical episodes that have no consistent plot, the incredibly bare animation that just does enough to classify itself as “animation”, the barren background, constant shifting from shitty CG animated characters to their also barely animated chibi versions, until a new character that isn’t Holmes or Hudson (not a typo) appears, often stylized in a horribly trite comedy fashion or ugly, awful animation, which its itself often inconsistent or clashes with previous shots.
Eventually a supposedly demon cat/familiar for Holmes appears, just letting you know, i guess they figured why not, we already doodled that not-a-black-cat thing in the opening, might as well be in the show, even if he just talks random bollocks in the final episodes, amounting to nothing,
To say nothing of how any “action” is animated here, just… wow. WHEN it’s actually shown and not just offscreen sounds of pummelling, shots and shit.
Even weirder is how it tries to have the final 3 episodes tell an actual narrative that actually ties into what the opening showed, but this is an anime series that used “distorted” art styles for the characters in one episode, didn’t shown the variations on Holmes’ sidekick by hiding them under a wooden barren and straight up asking you to buy the DVD version to see it… and that’s not even a meta joke, since a DVD boxset of the series does exist (and yes this came on TV).
So of course it’s a complete fake out.
Is it anti-humour? I dunno. It feels like an elaborate troll, or a desperate attempt at comedy, at best, but why even involve a studio for it? An animation studio i’ve never even heard before, Studio! Cucuri (yes, written like that), which only did this and even shorter slice of life comedy called “Neko mo, Onda-ke!”, with 12 episodes running 1 minute (yes, singular) each.
I seriously have no explanation besides trying to deliberately make a shitty anime, since it’s technically based on a – supposedly – popular japanese only smarthphone game of the same name, but this isn’t so bad so good, this is just an imperscrutable pile of sad nothingness.
Not just sad and pointless, uninteresting and aggressively unfunny too!
You can be bad, you can be outright shit, so you could at least be interesting or intriguing, but Vampire Holmes it’s just a miserable, mind boggling sad time of an anime, only vaguely excusable because it basically admits it’s non-sense right away and because you can binge watch the entire series in 30 minutes tops. You’ve been warned, Vampire Holmes seems to say to its potential audience, as to entice people like me that wanna still see the circus freak, only to still get blue balls because there’s nothing of worth here to “Mr. Bungle” out by perusing the entire thing.
The only aspect that’s passable is the voice acting, and even that isn’t worth discussing in detail.
So yeah, i have no doubt in mind about calling Vampire Holmes one of the worst anime series i’ve ever seen in my life, stat. What a horrible pile of nothing, so much that i want back that half hour it took me to see all the series, somehow. It ain’t pure rock bottom, but it’s pretty damn close, it’s stuff so bad that not the director isn’t even list on ANN.
I have seen fake animes parodies inside actual animes that were funnier than this thing.
Wise Cafe (International) 