The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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.

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.

We've gotten two theatrically released Dracula films this year. Truly we are living in good times.

I was extremely excited for this movie. A gothic horror film on a ship? A golden premise. And, delivers on its premise more often than not.

The film has glowing, gorgeous cinematography, a haunting musical score, and is acted to perfection, with even the child performance being quite good. And I was even more impressed with the production design. The ship creaks and becomes a character unto itself, with eeriness lurking in the shadows.

The writing is mixed, though. The script does make great use of the small location and has sufficient thematic depth and a few strong character beats. But unfortunately it's also bogged down with a lot of empty characters and too many scenes of meandering, repetitive conversation.

And even with the great visual craft on display, I found the scares particularly weak. Not a single one was unpredictable or frightening.

Even with its weaknesses, I implore you to see this film. We need to keep getting fresh films like this that take risks and show us original concepts.

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.

The only other Dracula movie I've seen was the original 1931 movie while I was in class, though I was barely paying attention to it, so...

Anyway, this movie was pretty decent and it was enjoyable for what it was. (I got the theatre all to myself, which was fun, but I forgot how big and salty a large bag of popcorn was, so that may have ruined it for me) The acting was fine, the characters were at least mildly interesting, I liked the costumes, and the tension was decent as well.

I do think that Woody Norman did pretty well, his character was probably my favorite overall lol

What confused me a little is that the characters were a bit stupid?? So, Dracula is on the ship (though I don't think they know it's him yet), killing people on the ship, they don't decide to search the crates until later in the movie, and in the middle of the night at that?

However, the movie did manage to get me slightly sad during one of the scenes, which is good because I usually get mad at movies instead of sad.

I'd try to give it a watch if I were you but don't expect a cinematic masterpiece or anything like that.