Film review: ‘DRACULA: THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

Dracula: The Last Voyage of The Demeter is an adaptation of a section entitled Captain’s Log from Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula.  While director André Øvredal (Trollhunter, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) has conjured a tense and visceral horror story from this sliver of the novel, the source material’s limitations do show.

The film sees the crew of the ship, ‘The Demeter’ terrorised by the dreaded vampire as they try to make their way from Drac’s home of Transylvania to London.  As the increasingly panicked crew are knocked off, those remaining, including ship’s doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins), stowaway Anna (Aisling Franciosi) and first mate Wojchek (David Dastalmachian) try to devise a plan to defeat the hungry neck muncher before he reaches the human smorgasbord of London.

Øvredal and cinematographer Tom Stern create an effectively grim and foreboding atmosphere as the sinister vampire stalks the crew. With the camera prowling the dark and confined corridors of the creaky ship, the film at times recalls Alien.  There’s also a touch of The Thing in the way the characters become increasingly paranoid and begin to turn on one another. While the film seems a little derivative, these familiar aspects probably demonstrate how the Dracula story which mostly precedes cinema, is woven into our culture and particularly our horror mythology.

Dracula here is the very nasty looking Nosferatu version, not the Bela Lugosi slicked back tuxedo wearing gentleman vampire or the strangely suntanned George Hamilton incarnation.  With a mouth full of fangs that would keep an orthodontist occupied for a year, old Drac’s quite an imposing site.  Suffice to say, thanks to this nasty bald-headed Count, there are a few genuinely creepy moments.  There’s also just enough gore and violence to justify the MA15+ rating.

While it often makes for an effective supernatural horror film, there’s the inescapable feeling we’re watching a fragment of a story blown out to feature length and the plot becomes a little repetitive.  A film like Alien worked around this sort of limitation by progressively adding to the creature’s mythology but that’s a little hard to do with such a well-known monster as Dracula.

Consequently, Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter isn’t a strikingly original film but its production values mostly impress and it delivers the basic horror elements and monster pop-outs pretty effectively.

Nick’s rating: ***

Genre: Horror/ drama/ historical.

Classification: MA15+.

Director(s): André Øvredal.

Release date: 27th Aug 2023.

Running time: 119 mins.

Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.

 

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