The Last Voyage of the Demeter

KevMayo88

Such a braindead film. The ship is travelling from Bulgaria to London, so is realistically fairly close to a port for most of it's journey- they are not thousands of miles from civiliasation as the film likes to suggest. When the crew start getting brutally killed, why don't they just travel to the nearest port and depart? ...Because one character says if they make a stop before London, they will lose their 'bonuses'.

The whole film lacks any sense of tension and is filled with characters making completely dumb, nonsensical decisions, and the sequel bait at the end is total cringe (I was genuinely expecting the protagonist to change his name to 'Mr. V. Helsing'). The film is a boring mess, which is a pity, because on paper the premise was actually interesting.

Tony EH

Mmmmm, thought it was pretty mediocre myself.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121147152#Comment_121147152

They really struggled to figure a smart way to have the iterative murder structure with a monster that literally slept during the day; having the woman accidentally only highlighted the clunky ignoring of Dracula's daylight slumber.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121151910#Comment_121151910

It's 'Alien' on a boat, which is naturally going to pose some problems. In 'Alien' you can get away with the idea that the Nostromo is huge and there's loads of places to hide. But the Demeter is relatively small and there's not a lot of places a vampire can lay low for the day. In 'Dracula', Bram Stoker wisely just mentioned the Demeter as a ghost ship that arrived into port one day and didn't go into any detail. I think it's just mentioned briefly in a diary entry. That suffices to the reader and we don't think any further on it. However, with 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter', the viewer is forced to consider just how clunky, to use your word, the whole concept is and it just ends up not working because there's too many things standing in the way of the basic concept.

I think the series 'Dracula' by Mark Gatiss worked the Demeter story a lot better, even if that miniseries had some very serious flaws. The episode involving the Demeter was more in line with an Agatha Christie story than the slasher approach that this movie took.

The movie is fine for wasting a couple of hours, but it's not something that will be a repeat watch or that will live long in anyone's memory.

As an aside I also disliked the fact that Dracula was in "monster mode" all the time.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121153422#Comment_121153422

I think the idea did have potential, lots of it, even with that slim original text - but they took the entirely wrong template to work off. As you say, "Alien on a Boat" doesn't work unless the boat itself was bloody massive. If they rejigged the whole adaptation to Edwardian era and have "The Demeter" an old-school cruiseliner, or even go modern-day and make it a giant cargo ship? Then you could as you say have the monster hiding in an otherwise cavernous location. I guess the makers had some overeager enthusiasm to keep things as faithful to the original as possible.

I laughed out out when they found a body at night-time, then we crash cut straight to day-time & the crew discussing the murder. So ... what, they just decided to think on things a while and go back to bed? Nobody thought of searching this really small cargo ship? It was such a clumsy way to avoid realising they had the whole of day-time to search a really tiny place, and to eek out the drama.

But like you said, this is not going to live long in the memory or even attain some cult following - it has probably already got more chatter than it deserved lol