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Is Supernatural Horror Flick 'The Last Voyage Of The Demeter' A Disservice To Dracula? Here's What The Reviews Say
Dracula is a fictional character that is now in the public domain, so anyone can use him for their vampiric fan service. He's been around in pop culture since 1897, and has seen countless appearances on the big screen, from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman. And now, we get a more bat-looking version who stalks a boat, which is quite different to a well-dressed rich man in a dusty old castle.
But is this new adaptation, covering only a chapter from Bram Stoker's original novel, any good? Here's what critics have to say.
"The Last Voyage of the Demeter" stars Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham and David Dastmalchian. It releases in theaters on August 11, 2023.
The premise
"The Last Voyage of the Demeter" has a terrible title, but in theory the film sounds intriguing. It wants to be an old-fashioned monster movie, the kind they used to produce back when horror films were actual movies, made with the stodgy well-carpentered rhythm that any movie was made with. "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" is set in 1897, and for most of it we're aboard a large wooden ship with multiple sails — the Demeter, a handsome relic, since this is already the era when metal ships were coming in — that’s sailing from Bulgaria to London. The film moves slowly and deliberately, and it's been shot like some studio sea-voyage period drama from 1966. Much of it is incredibly, knowingly square, with each crew member defined by one or two traits. But this is not just any ship, or any monster.
The film was adapted from the "Captain’s Log" section of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," which chronicles what happens after Dracula stows himself aboard the Demeter to travel to London. There are 50 shipping crates aboard, all shaped like coffins and filled with dirt. And Dracula haunts the vessel like the most spectral of demons — or, at least, he did in the novel, and in the shipboard sequence of "Nosferatu" (1922), where Max Schreck famously played the vampire as a skeletal nightmare zombie aristocrat with sticklike teeth and febrile eyes staring out of his bald rat's head.
It's very long movie for something based on a single chapter
Whereas Stoker's interlude is compact and chilling, "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" is bloated and banal. Various artists have attempted to bring this tale to the screen over the past 20 years, and though director André Øvredal has thus triumphed where they failed, the end result suggests that it was a project best left unrealized. Whether hewing to the letter of Stoker's source material or branching off in novel directions, this B-movie distends itself without purpose, and frequently in ways that, in light of what we know about the rest of Dracula's legend (both before and after these events), make little sense.
There's something Lovecraftian and dread-inducing about this chapter in Bram Stoker's novel. The brief glimpses we get of a crew being picked off by a ruthless entity feed into this fierce terror of the unknown too awful to comprehend. But a Lovecraftian fear of the unknown is hard to adapt into a good horror movie, so Øvredal and screenwriters Bragi Schut and Jr. Zak Olkewicz opted for "Alien on a ship."
The actors salvage what they can from a sinking ship
The latter is played by the excellent character actor David Dastmalchian, whose reliably over-the-top performance as the ship's first mate suggests that he understood the low-rent nature of this production better than anyone else aboard. If "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" benefits from both the fiery-eyed seriousness and the goofy-accented cartoonishness that Hawkins and Dastmalchian bring to their respective parts role, it suffers enormously from Øvredal’s inability to keep an even keel between them.
Corey Hawkins, who played Dr. Dre in "Straight Outta Compton," stars as Clemens, a doctor who boards the Demeter as it ships off from port. He's joined by Elliot ("Game of Thrones'" Liam Cunningham), the ship's captain, first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) and several others, mostly bearded sea types who aren't long for the world.
It needs more practical effects and less CGI
Javier Botet's Dracula is ghoulishly creepy. The horror stalwart plays the iconic vampire unconventionally, like a vulnerable boogeyman unable to control himself. That vulnerability belies primal savagery. The deaths are brutal and gory; there's nothing romantic about this depiction of the classic character, and Øvredal knows how to make the kills hurt the most. Respectably, the filmmaker makes excellent use of the film's R-rating.
If only those moments amounted to anything more than fleeting suggestions of a better film. For all of its occasional inspired images, The Last Voyage of the Demeter lacks real atmosphere or a necessary sense of unease. There's a tangibility missing from the environment of the ship and, for as neat as the creature design is, there are too many stray times when Dracula is lurking around in the dark that he looks like a cheap digital creation. It gives the film an off-putting artificial flavor which sucks out a lot of suspense.
There are other minor quibbles, like when computer animation steps in for practical craftsmanship that would look infinitely sharper, but nothing that's a stake to Last Voyage of the Demeter's heart. This movie adores being a horror time capsule that gives actors like Dastmalchian and Hawkins opportunities to pay homage to more theatrical genre films that relied on performance to supplement their visual trickery. Øvredal dusts off buried treasures of Old English verbiage and vampire mythology, and while excitement may lay in hiding for longer than hoped, the director unleashes his creature of the night in a way that would make Tod Browning proud.
TL;DR
You'll be longing for a lifeboat.
"The Last Voyage of the Demeter" is nevertheless a hugely enjoyable creature feature that brings fresh blood to one of cinema's grandest villains.
Handsomely mounted.
A really well shot, well acted and well executed horror film.
Every plot twist is easily anticipated.
Scratches a more gothic, atmospheric itch should you want your Counts a little more vicious.
