laflammemark

Count me in with those reviewers who actually appreciated this flick.

I liked the rising tension among the gang of friends.

I liked the ambiance of the woods and the backstory of witches who perished there.

I liked the group dynamic. So many reviewers complain about how every character is annoying... Hello! Have you ever BEEN with a group of teenagers when things get rough? If anything, I thought this flick should have been credited with presenting realistic scenarios, not calm, cool heroes and their screeching divas. If you found these characters annoying, you've probably forgotten all your old high school pals and how you used to act.

I even liked the ambiguous ending. Mostly, I thought every actor in this thing nailed their role and that the sordid back story was just enough to keep things tense and spicy.

It was spooky in places. All in all, I thought the filmmakers did a terrific job with it.

I don't get all the criticisms here, it's true, but I'll say this. Some of the funniest and cleverest reviews I've ever read are right here. The people who hated this movie at least expressed their hate in colorful ways.

I can't tell you how excited I was to watch this movie. As lifelong fan of Bram Stoker's novel - and that one delicious chapter in particular - I would stop at nothing to see this movie.

First, I signed up for a month of Paramount, which always makes me grind my teeth. Then, when I went to start the movie, I was informed, by a hateful blue box, that I had to get the next LEVEL of Paramount - with Showtime - in order to watch this movie, which was obviously going to be spectacular.

Whatever. I paid the money and started the movie.

The opening scene was tepid, I thought, and not a good translation of Stoker's work.

Whatever. That was just one scene. It was bound to get better from there.

Right?

Nope. To me, this movie started going downhill before they even boarded the ship, thanks to some really clumsy acting and a whole bunch of historical inaccuracies.

It only got worse from there.

In Stoker's novel, the horror of that fateful voyage was that nobody ever saw the creature that was wreaking havoc upon the ship. The creature was a specter; an evil presence no more substantial than shadows to the terrified men on the Demeter. The horror was the unknown; that pervasive sense of doom at the hands of something that was felt but never seen.

So, what do these movie writers do? They start trotting out a Gollum looking Dracula a half hour in. By the 45 minute mark, you're kind of sick of seeing him. The ancient evil of Vlad the Impaler has been reduced to just another Hollywood monster running around and killing without any sense of guile or mystery. Somehow, these wretched filmmakers managed to demystify one of the most compelling horror movie villains of all time.

The acting was terrible, almost across the board. The actor who played the heroic and flawless doctor was the worst of them all and of course he was in every scene, performing miracles (a blood transfusion without sorting out blood types? Cool trick) and making lofty speeches about flaws in the human condition. This doctor/philosopher/astronomer/sailor was portrayed so clumsily, I couldn't take serious a single scene he was in.

As far as I can tell, this movie didn't do a single thing right. There was never that pervasive feeling of unease that a long voyage with a vampire should inspire. There was no sense of dread, no worry for any of the stale and shallow characters.

This movie, which should have been so great, is the bottom of the barrel. I'd rather sit through the worst found footage film out there than to suffer through the Demeter voyage again.

I have no one to blame but myself. I know that Paramount is among the worst of the streaming services out there and I know that IMDB can't be trusted, yet here I am, suckered again by the promise of a movie that turned out to be pure crap.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is to be avoided, in my view, by anyone who truly understands why that beautiful chapter in Bram Stoker's novel was as frightening as it was.

If all you want is just another creature feature? Knock yourself out.