Le dernier voyage du Demeter

As a Dracula film this is pretty subpar. Honestly the worst depiction of Dracula, as a meandering, crawling, naked goblin thing that can barely speak and kills with its claws and inefficiently consumes about 50% of the victims blood while spraying the rest all over the place like a slasher film. Hardly accurate to the highly experienced and methodical killer from the book who has mastered the art over centuries. Additionally, the movie is by no means accurate to the books plot as the crew is the wrong nationality and the sequence of events doesn't even attempt to mirror that which was logged in the ship log from the book. So what is this? I'll tell you what it is. It's a movie about a 19th century cargo ship which gets terrorized by a creature that can only be explained by legend, despite taking place in an age of science, and which was inspired by a chapter in the book Dracula. So why try and limit the stories capability within the parameters of Dracula when you could have easily made adjustments to the plot and made your own independent story? Beats me but that's what they did and there is no fixing it. Shame.

They talked about the moorland but didn't show anything.

Also they didn't show anything bah Romania or Bulgaria.

These two factors reduced the atmosphere.

The movie is creepy at times, the settings claustrophobic n the idea of exploring the uncharted portion of the novel is downright solid but the lack of blood n action made me give low ratings.

Also some of the scenes are shot in too much darkness n the kills happens very fast. Some terrible fast cut editing which ruins the fun.

The make up of the Dracoola will remind of Nosferatu 1922 n Salem's Lot.

The characters make dumb decisions. After eventually knowing that the creature hides during the sunlight n inspite of knowing his hiding place, nobody takes the effort to throw his casket in the water nor do they try to search him or destroy his casket during the daytime.

Also why the Dracoola goes after Joseph (the chef) is beyond me.

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.

'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' ended up being a lot better than I expected. I haven't seen a good vampire film in such a long time that I was really starting to suspect the genre had very little left to offer. Naturally then, I went into this film with rather low expectations. The film pleasantly surprised me though.

The film is very well made. We start with a scene from later in the movie. I'm not always the biggest fan of this, but in this case it was needed as there was a lengthy time of set-up at the beginning of the film, where if there wasn't promise of excitement to come, it could've lost some audience members.

Once the horror begins it was reasonably effective. The ship in the middle of the ocean is a truly great setting for a horror movie. There are a lot of night scenes too (vampire movies naturally always have a lot of those) which added to the suspenseful atmosphere.

And outside of the horror there was some decent stuff going on too. Some character's who were actually fairly likeable (unheard of in a modern horror film, right?). Also some very well written dialogue helped flesh things out and kept the less interesting scenes afloat.

The film wasn't afraid to break some boundaries too. Often in films like this you can tell at the start all the characters that are 100% going to be safe, but that wasn't the case here. I was pleasantly surprised by that.

All in all this did about as well with the concept as could've been expected. It's not a film I will likely ever watch again. But it passed two hours for me in reasonably enjoyable fashion. 6.5/10.

Overall the movie was OK but not GREAT. I knew this film would be different from the trailers and that it was. Horror/Fantasy I guess you could call it? Definitely not scary or jumpy. I thought the cinematography was pretty good and the story definitely had some potential. I found the acting good I just felt at times I found it to be a bit cheesy. I feel like they gave away too many clues in the beginning and than it dragged itself out for a while before anything really happens. The ending is pretty decent I'll give it that. You definitely have to like this genre to fully appreciate the movie I think. If you're not a fan of this stuff and you're just going for something to do you probably won't enjoy it.