The Last Voyage of the Demeter: Bat-Boy Dracula and a Ship of Food
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
You are allowed an uneasy feeling if you’re sailing out of your latest port of call in Romania, and there are more signs-of-the-cross made by the folks on shore than at a Catholic mass.
The villagers know something dire about the manifest of boxes aboard the creaky cargo ship Demeter, which is setting forth for London on a grim day in 1897.
Of course, the audience for the sadly predictable horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter knows it too.
If you’re familiar with the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, you know the Demeter is the ill-fated ship that carried the Count and tons of domestic dirt to London. In the novel, it’s a perfunctory chapter, consisting mainly of increasingly alarmed log entries by the captain, prior to the discovery of the ship washed up on shore in England, sans crew. Stoker wisely left many details for the readers to conjure in their minds.
For those unfamiliar with the novel, the film by André Øvredal (The Troll Hunter), helpfully opens post-shipwreck with the discovery of said log.
So, assuming The Last Voyage of the Demeter doesn’t stray significantly from its source material (and it mostly doesn’t), the movie lacks suspense, since everyone on board is marked for death, like a gothic at-sea version of a modern slasher film.
At one point, the movie was to be titled Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter. And I’m glad it doesn’t, since it mostly does a disservice to history’s most famous vampire.
For what it’s worth, this is the second film iteration of lesser-told segments of the book, coming months after Nicolas Cage’s performance as Drac in the bloody, campy Renfield.
Where that movie at least gave us a Dracula with personality, ego and nasty charm, The Last Voyage of the Demeter goes full-Nosferatu (not my favourite incarnation), with Javier Botet playing a murderous man-sized mole-rat with bat wings. Hey, in the Victorian era they may have liked mannered monsters, but we want ours to look like they came from a creature-shop.
This is the dark, poetic Count who, earlier in the book, rhapsodized, “Listen to them, the creatures of the night. What music they make!”
Conversely, you can count the number of words spoken by Demeter’s Dracula on the fingers of one hand. Mostly, he says things like, “Screeeeeee!!”
To his credit, Øvredal can sustain a mood, and the cast subtly slides into their realization of doom. Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham), accompanied by his grandson Toby (Woody Norman), is literally on his last voyage, intending to retire and hand over the captaincy to his first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian). Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a Cambridge-trained doctor whose expertise is undermined by his race, is on board, as is a partly-exsanguinated young woman named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) who is discovered under a pile of rags and canvas in the hold.
She is, of course, a snack Drac had packed, and her removal hastens the carnage. Once conscious, she brings them up to speed on the hold Dracula had held over her village for centuries. (I imagine said villagers were cracking open bottles of Slivovitz to celebrate his emigration to England. Hey, maybe there’s a movie in that!).
The crew’s attempts to fight back involve useless things like knives and guns. And there are dumb moments, like a nighttime search for the Count – this, even after they have observed the effects of sunlight on vampires.
The movie moves, the deaths are bloody enough for genre fans, blood measurable in ounces rather than gallons. There are worse vampire films, and the period-mood is a nice change-of-pace for horror. Overall, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a middling entry in the Dracula canon.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Directed by André Øvredal. Starring Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham and Aisling Franciosi. In theatres Friday, August 11.