The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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.

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.

I enjoyed The Last Voyage of the Demeter. It's a cool stand-alone movie in a subgenre I frequently enjoy. There are a bunch of cool scenes and powerful moments. It does a good job creating unique characters. The performances are fairly good all around, with the standout being Liam Cunningham of GoT fame.

The movie also has a bunch of issues. I couldn't understand a lot of the dialogue. This is partly due to the accents, but more to do with sound mixing. I wasn't as engaged as I should have been. And not everything works.

But the biggest thing holding it back is that it's slow. It takes a while to get going. It's a full hour into the movie before you see anything. Now this could have been enjoyable if we didn't know what to expect. We would have been wondering what's happening, what's causing all of this. But of course the trailers give it away.

And even for people who avoid trailers like me and went in not knowing, the movie tells you in text right at the start. Instead of filling you with curiosity, you already know and are just waiting to get to it. And even after that, it doesn't pick up the pace all that much.

I still had a pretty good time with this movie, although I don't really see myself watching it again. (1 viewing, opening Thursday 8/10/2023)

The only other Dracula movie I've seen was the original 1931 movie while I was in class, though I was barely paying attention to it, so...

Anyway, this movie was pretty decent and it was enjoyable for what it was. (I got the theatre all to myself, which was fun, but I forgot how big and salty a large bag of popcorn was, so that may have ruined it for me) The acting was fine, the characters were at least mildly interesting, I liked the costumes, and the tension was decent as well.

I do think that Woody Norman did pretty well, his character was probably my favorite overall lol

What confused me a little is that the characters were a bit stupid?? So, Dracula is on the ship (though I don't think they know it's him yet), killing people on the ship, they don't decide to search the crates until later in the movie, and in the middle of the night at that?

However, the movie did manage to get me slightly sad during one of the scenes, which is good because I usually get mad at movies instead of sad.

I'd try to give it a watch if I were you but don't expect a cinematic masterpiece or anything like that.

To have fleshed out some very sparse diary entries into a full movie is a decent enough turn. Good cast, however they have a very limited gambit to run, less than a short storys worth of source material with zero ability for true character development. More a concept with arms and legs at a push. Its neatly done, the scripts a bit rough and ready but by no means is this the worst vampire movie to reach the big screen in the last two or three years. Less CGI would have been great as Javier botet is up there with doug jones in terms of his abilites on the physical acting front. Also not sure about the anna character , think the film would have been better without that as a framing device they could have gone more into the realms of john carpenters the thing , having that kind of suspense - all in all worth a watch.