The Last Voyage of the Demeter

We've gotten two theatrically released Dracula films this year. Truly we are living in good times.

I was extremely excited for this movie. A gothic horror film on a ship? A golden premise. And, delivers on its premise more often than not.

The film has glowing, gorgeous cinematography, a haunting musical score, and is acted to perfection, with even the child performance being quite good. And I was even more impressed with the production design. The ship creaks and becomes a character unto itself, with eeriness lurking in the shadows.

The writing is mixed, though. The script does make great use of the small location and has sufficient thematic depth and a few strong character beats. But unfortunately it's also bogged down with a lot of empty characters and too many scenes of meandering, repetitive conversation.

And even with the great visual craft on display, I found the scares particularly weak. Not a single one was unpredictable or frightening.

Even with its weaknesses, I implore you to see this film. We need to keep getting fresh films like this that take risks and show us original concepts.

They talked about the moorland but didn't show anything.

Also they didn't show anything bah Romania or Bulgaria.

These two factors reduced the atmosphere.

The movie is creepy at times, the settings claustrophobic n the idea of exploring the uncharted portion of the novel is downright solid but the lack of blood n action made me give low ratings.

Also some of the scenes are shot in too much darkness n the kills happens very fast. Some terrible fast cut editing which ruins the fun.

The make up of the Dracoola will remind of Nosferatu 1922 n Salem's Lot.

The characters make dumb decisions. After eventually knowing that the creature hides during the sunlight n inspite of knowing his hiding place, nobody takes the effort to throw his casket in the water nor do they try to search him or destroy his casket during the daytime.

Also why the Dracoola goes after Joseph (the chef) is beyond me.

Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) is a movie that my wife and I saw in theaters this evening. The storyline follows the infamous voyage of the Demeter from Romania to London with a mysterious cargo. As strange things start happening around the ship the crew starts poking around the cargo and find a "stowaway" that warns them about an unworldly entity they must escape. Will the crew take the warning seriously or fall victim to whatever is haunting the ship?

This movie is directed by André Øvredal (Troll Hunter) and stars Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton), Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), David Dastmalchian (The Suicide Squad), Aisling Franciosi (Game of Thrones) and Jon Jon Briones (Ratched).

This storyline, settings and special effects had so much potential. The plot is well set up, the attire and props are perfect, and the cast was well selected. The CGI used to create Dracula and his face were outstanding. There's some really creepy moments in here and some worthwhile jump scares. The kill scenes were intense, brutal and have nice gore and blood splatter. The transformation scenes are good too. However, the movie does run a bit long, I didn't "love" the ending and the entire film I felt like there was something missing and I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Overall, this is a unique and solid addition to the Dracula universe but leaves you with a feeling it was missing something that keep it from being outstanding. I would score this a 6-6.5/10 and recommend seeing it once.

'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' ended up being a lot better than I expected. I haven't seen a good vampire film in such a long time that I was really starting to suspect the genre had very little left to offer. Naturally then, I went into this film with rather low expectations. The film pleasantly surprised me though.

The film is very well made. We start with a scene from later in the movie. I'm not always the biggest fan of this, but in this case it was needed as there was a lengthy time of set-up at the beginning of the film, where if there wasn't promise of excitement to come, it could've lost some audience members.

Once the horror begins it was reasonably effective. The ship in the middle of the ocean is a truly great setting for a horror movie. There are a lot of night scenes too (vampire movies naturally always have a lot of those) which added to the suspenseful atmosphere.

And outside of the horror there was some decent stuff going on too. Some character's who were actually fairly likeable (unheard of in a modern horror film, right?). Also some very well written dialogue helped flesh things out and kept the less interesting scenes afloat.

The film wasn't afraid to break some boundaries too. Often in films like this you can tell at the start all the characters that are 100% going to be safe, but that wasn't the case here. I was pleasantly surprised by that.

All in all this did about as well with the concept as could've been expected. It's not a film I will likely ever watch again. But it passed two hours for me in reasonably enjoyable fashion. 6.5/10.

I am a huge Dracula fan. To this day, it is still one of my favorite books, one which I've read again and again. So when I saw they were doing a movie based on the Demeter voyage chapter, I was very excited. However this movie just didn't do it for me.

One of the biggest complaints is the run time. It's 2 hours long and you can really feel it. It starts off strong with a solid opening, then doing a decent job building the suspense of the hidden terror lurking in the bowels of the ship. However, instead of ramping things up once we see Dracula, it instead drags it's feet to hit that long runtime. Likewise, the more we see of Dracula, the more the cgi effects look noticeably bad.

My other big complaint is that the movie takes a lot of creative liberty. Tbf in the book, all we really get is a brief captains log, which the movie does quote. But it's obvious the film's writers played the game "well the author didn't say this person wasn't there, so that means we can add them". For instance, the book never says they found a stowaway, but it "also didn't say they didn't find a stowaway " so let's add one, make her a female, and make her to be the only one with knowledge about Dracula while all the men are angry and dumb. The book never said there was child, but it "also never said there wasn't one" so let's add a kid because nothing ruins a horror movie's stakes like a having a kid since you know Hollywood would never approve of killing him off. The book never said they had a random black guy on board who happened to be a secret doctor and knows all about blood transfusion, but it "also never explicitly said this man wasn't there" so let's make him our main character, not the Captain of the titular ship who's log this whole movie is supposed to be based off of.

If you haven't read the books, this stuff probably won't bother you. But if you have read the books, you'll be disappointed the movie's writers played this stupid game to insert modern societal problems into an 1800s Russian shipping voyage. The big problem for me is the more time they devote run time to this trivial messaging about societal problems, the less time they devote to showing the horror and propelling the story, which is the whole point of a horror movie.

Cut this stuff out, the movie is noticeably shorter and has a much better flow. And this isn't a gripe on any of the actors, they all play the roles surprisingly well especially for a horror movie.