[3]
When I heard they were making a feature-length movie out of a teeny-weenie section of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, focusing solely on Dracula’s boat trip from Romania to England, I wondered, “How are they going to keep that from getting boring?” The answer: They don’t. We know Dracula kills the whole crew of the Demeter before the ship hits shore, and this film reminds us of as much right at the top. So the rest of the movie — a really long, full two hours — is just watching them all get picked off one by one. And with next-to-no surprises, The Last Voyage of the Demeter plays out exactly as you might expect it to.
If there were any characters that I liked or could invest in, I might have enjoyed this movie more. But the cast is very underwhelming here, in under-written roles that never grab my attention. The most famous actor in the film is probably Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), but he’s the dullest, most wishy-washy ship captain ever. The main character (Corey Hawkins) is distrusted by the rest of the crew (of course), but that goes away soon enough. His character arc stems from wanting ‘to make sense of the world’, or some lame shit like that. The best acting in the whole film comes from a child actor, Woody Norman, who cries after Dracula eats all the livestock he’s charged with looking after. The film really lost me when it essentially murders this poor kid twice in the most brutal ways. His death is meant to shock, but it feels like a cheap ploy to me.
I liked two visceral moments in the film: one when a bitten crew-member is tied to a post. No one — not even the victim — knows what’s going to happen when the sun rises on him. The second is a scene where Dracula flies around the ship in the fog at night, giving the surround sound speakers a nice opportunity to do their thing. But the entire rest of this movie bored me. All of its attempts to emotionally engage felt desperate and overwrought, including large portions of Bear McCreary’s heavy, cliché-ridden score. I couldn’t stop looking at the clock and wishing it would end already.
I don’t mind formulaic slasher movies now and then, which despite its period veneer, is all this movie is. But it’s a lot more fun when the victims are horny teenagers and the monster is a real stuntman in a hockey mask instead of a digital Dracula.
Directed by Andre Ovredal (Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe). With David Dastmalchian, Aisling Franciosi, and Stefan Kapicic.