Dance in the Vampire Bund - Episode 9

With the last episode of Dance in the Vampire Bund bringing Mina Tepes a new baddie to play with, so this ninth instalment of the series reveals exactly what Hysterica's ploy is.

In short, it's all about terrorism, with Hysterica looking to send out her minions as suicide bombers around Tokyo, detonating them all at the same time via a mobile phone signal - The kind of storyline which will doubtless have the Daily Mail proclaiming the headline "SICK CARTOON PROMOTES SUICIDE BOMBERS" or something equally nonsensical.


Anyhow, needless to say Mina sets out to stop this atrocity, using Akira and his werewolf pals to sniff out the suicide bombers while she deals with Hysterica herself. This adds up to some pretty smart efforts to foil Hysterica's plan with some good timing and clever thinking, while we're also giving a fair old slice of action for a series that has arguably shied away from some good old fight sequences a little too frequently. Eventually, everything ends well for all involved, assuming you ended up on the side of the good guys of course.

Overall, this particular episode of Dance in the Vampire Bund manages to continue the show's steady upward rise beyond being merely dull into something rather more acceptable. It certainly isn't blazing new trails or making us marvel in wonder at its storylines, but as a piece of entertainment it does a good enough job at expressing what it wants to, and it's finally starting to feel as though SHAFT have got to grips with animating and pacing this series. There are worse ways to spend twenty minutes than watching this particular instalment, that's for sure.