Your Daily Dracula – Ryo Yoshizawa as ‘Ranmaru Mori’, Baban Baban Ban Vampire (2025)
A live-action feature version of a manga series by writer-artist Hiromasa Okujima, which has previously been adapted as an anime TV series. It’s an odd duck, and kind of queasy in its central relationship: 450-year-old vampire Ranmaru Mori (Ryo Yoshizawa) is saved after a brush with a vampire hunter by ten-year-old boy Rihito Tatsuno, with whom the vampire becomes smitten … though he resolves not to drink his blood until he turns eighteen, with the proviso that the kid stays a virgin so he’ll taste better. Fifteen-year-old Rihito (Rihito Itagaki) starts a senior school and instantly falls in love with Aoi (Nanoka Hara), a pretty girl whose bodybuilder brother Ken (Mandy Sekiguchi) is known as ‘Franken’ to add a Frankenstein to the Dracula archetype (no Wolf Man shows up). When Ranmaru floors Franken with one punch, the tough kid becomes Ranmaru’s devoted best buddy and enforcer. Home room teacher Sakamoto (Shinnosyuek Mitsumishima) is also the vampire hunter who was after Ranmaru, but he’s changed his mind about vampires and wants to be bitten. Sakamoto also draws a diagram on a blackboard and explains the complicated, yet cartoonish relationships – Ranmaru wants Rihito, Rihito loves Aoi, Aoi is a vampire fan with a crush on Ranmaru, etc.
It’s mostly a high school comedy of innocent pansexual yearnings, with gay grooming and s-m nibbling thrown in, and surprisingly sweet, as if someone remade The Little Vampire as a teenage gay awakening soap. An element of threat which feels like the obligatory vampire feud plotting of Twilight is provided by another vampire, Nagayoshi (Gordon Maeda), who has a grude against Ranmaru from feudal times when Lord Nobunaga (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi) picked Ranmaru as his favourite retainer. I’d presumed that Mori was named after Mori Kishida, who played the Dracula archetype vampire in the Toho Bloodthirsty movies of the 1970s, but he’s a historical character reimagined as a vampire.
While waiting for Rihito to grow up – this element of the film is unavoidably uncomfortable, especially since there’s a lot of inexplicit male nudity – Ranmaru works in Rihito’s family bath-house. The kid’s family seem to think Ranmaru is an overly committed role-player who dresses and acts like a vampire … Ranmaru has pointed ears, optional fangs and goes about in a Dracula cape and frilly shirt. He also flies, hangs upside-down like Grandpa Munster, does martial arts and spends a lot of time being petty and jealous. Oh, it’s also a musical – most of the characters sing exposition to camera (rather catchily) – and has some wildly exaggerated elements – the pile of knocked-out bodies in the gym where Franken takes on multiple sparring partners – and a bright sparkly look.
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