Vampire Holmes Review

The premise is a joke the series never gets to tell. Holmes is a detective who does not reason and does not explain, which is a workable comic engine: put an incompetent at the center of a mystery format and let the format do the suffering. Vampire Holmes builds no format for him to fail inside. Across twelve episodes of roughly three minutes each there is no case, no vampire hunt and almost no plot, only Holmes and Hudson standing in low detail environments talking, interrupted occasionally by an animal.

The production is the other half of it. Characters are stiff 3D models with limited articulation moved through empty scenes, mouth movement rarely matches the line, and the staging is a run of flat two shots with no reason to cut between them. The theme song, Everlasting Love, is a finished piece of pop music performed by an established singer, and it is the only element here made to a professional standard.

There is a version of this that works as a three minute gag show, and one or two exchanges between Holmes and Hudson land well enough to prove it exists. The rest is a game promotion with a title promising two genres and delivering neither, and it has held its place near the bottom of every fan ranking since it aired for exactly that reason.