The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Looks good, i'm in..

I've always hated the vampire as a sex object. Sure, it was hinted at in Bram Stoker's novel and became bolted on with Anne Rice. But I prefer the vampire as a viscous, repulsive, animal myself. Something that needs to be put down rather than envied or attracted to. I'd take Kinski's Nosferatu or the vamps from '30 Days of Night' over most iterations any day of the week.

There's probably a thousand different takes on what Stoker was up to when he wrote 'Dracula', but without input from the man himself, they're practically worthless and there's no solid agreement to be found on any of the subtexts that have been put forward by various scholars, much of which was conjured up years after the author had died. In the end all of these musings could simply be the product of overactive imaginations and Stoker simply just set out to write a spooky story about a vampire that made a few quid for him.

In any case, one could read 'Dracula' and have any subtext pass them by quite easily, especially one that's of a sexual nature as there's not much of that in it. There's certainly some romantic elements therein and Stoker wrote more romance works than horror. But overt references to anything sexual (or any of the other proposed subtexts) would be rather hard to pin down, unlike in, say, Le Fanu's 'Camilla'. Although, I would suggest that most 19th Century readers of that story would have had the lesbian aspects fly right over their heads.

But the character of Dracula as sex object really only became a thing with his appearance on the screen in the 1930's, and even then it remained extremely subtle in the Universal movie. But unfortunately (IMO) such a thing has mired the vampire ever since to the point where the classic monster has become tamed into a milquetoast sexual fantasy of an extremely dubious nature.

I've read 'Dracula' three times and one thing I will say about it is that it's a dreadfully written book and one where the titular character disappears for its bulk. It does have its moments and can be quite atmospheric, but after an admittedly brilliant opening section it settles into a turgid series of scrappy information that doesn't get going again until the end.

As for Stoker himself being gay, there's really no proof of that and it's probably just wishful thinking on behalf of certain people. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde for a period, but that in and of itself means nothing. Wilde had many friends in theatre who weren't gay, a number of which vocally opposed his imprisonment for his homosexuality. But that's certainly no evidence that the people writing in good favour of Wilde were themselves homosexual. I think the question of Stoker's sexuality is, more than likely, just another bit of "pink revisionism" in which some have pounced upon singular snippets of extremely tenuous information and bloated it into an unfounded notion in order to claim a famous individual as "one of their own" as it were.

I saw part of the trailer and it felt like a straight to digital release (as I said I only saw part of the trailer) but a few weeks it came up in an article about box office taking and apparently this is a big deal for Universal.

Always open to filmmakers trying something new classic characters. Be interesting to see if they make it creepy despite knowing how it all turns out.

no irish release date?

Had been a bit worried with the amount of clips they've released. You could probably see half the movie if you watched them all 😂

Having said all that, the elevator pitch of Alien by way of vampires on a ship had me interested from the get go.

In fairness it is based on part of the book, but yeah to drag it out it's basically that. This film has been in production hell almost as long as Vlad has been sleeping.

Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro both loved it so now I am looking forward to seeing it. :)

Getting mixed reviews. The common complaint is that it's a bit slow, anaemic, and the conclusion to the story is already known.

It's become a bit of internet meme

Wonder Woman is having a laugh anyway

That was a lot better than i was expecting. Definitely worth a watch if you like the genre.

Mmmmm, thought it was pretty mediocre myself.

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.