André Øvredal’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is technically adapted from the chapter from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in which the famous vampire ships himself to England while feasting on the crew, but this drab and generic piece of mid-August schlock might as well be based on a napkin where someone once wrote: “What if ‘Alien,’ but on big wooden boat?”
The truth of the matter is that screenwriter Bragi Schut Jr. has been tinkering with the idea since his time working at a Hollywood model shop in the early 1990s, but his baby must have gotten lost at sea while treading water in development hell over the last several decades, because the derelict Ship of Theseus that’s drifting into theaters this weekend doesn’t reveal any trace of real passion or serious thought. It’s a movie about people who slowly come to realize over the course of several ultra-repetitive kill scenes that a nocturnal monster of some kind is living in their cargo hold (he’s sleeping in a giant crate that might as well be marked “Dracula’s bed”), but never think to, I don’t know, search for him during the day.
That decision made a bit more sense in Stoker’s novel, which was smart enough to obscure the Demeter’s crew from the cause of their demise, and even smarter not to render literature’s most famous vampire as a dull gray slate of 2002-ass CGI (all due respect to Spanish actor Javier Botet, who embodies the bat-man whenever it isn’t flying around and brings a lithe physicality to a creature devoid of all other personality). Our doomed sailors don’t even hip to the whole “kill the demon when it’s weak and unconscious” idea after watching most of their more bitten friends erupt into flames under the sun! I know it’s 1867, fellas, but act like you’ve seen a movie before.
That our heroic Clemens (a wildly overqualified Corey Hawkins) is a Cambridge-educated doctor who understands how viruses work should count for something, even if they didn’t necessarily cover vampires in his medical textbooks. Barring a useless flashforward that only exists to reassure anyone who thinks it’s called “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” because the boat gets sold for scrap metal in the end (and not because of all the death and destruction), the film begins with Clemens hanging around a Romanian port all Jack Dawson-like in the hopes that he might win a ticket back to London.
Instead he earns his passage home by endearing himself to the captain of the Demeter (a wildly overqualified Liam Cunningham) by saving his nine-year-old grandson (wildly overqualified “C’mon C’mon” star Woody Norman) from a falling coffin. Raining coffins is never a great omen, even if they don’t contain the desiccated body of Dracula and the woman he’s brought onboard as a snack (a wildly overqualified Aisling Franciosi, who does her utmost in a role that effectively boils down to “food”), but Clemens is a man of science, and life hasn’t left him much choice.
The reason for his return voyage is something of a reveal, I suppose, but let’s just say the movie stumbles in its potentially interesting but frustratingly halfhearted efforts to frame Clemens’ experiences with bigotry as his ultimate motivation to kill Dracula. You know what else is a good motivation to kill Dracula? He’s Dracula.
Credited to Schut and Zak Olkewicz, the shooting script seems to be under the delusion that it can illuminate the unreasonable nature of evil, which is extra adorable in a film so dark and lusterless that you can’t tell who you’re looking at half the time; like so many effects-driven studio horror movies of the last 15 years, “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is suffocated under a thick layer of unnatural gray murk that makes the whole production feel cheaper for trying to hide its budget constraints. It usually doesn’t matter, as most of the Demeter’s crew proves as interchangeable as their deaths (with the possible exception of Jon Jon Briones’ ultra-religious chef, whose character inspires the film to at least try and spice things up). One scene finds Dracula leaping out at the guy who hates Clemens because he’s Black, another finds Dracula leaping out at the guy who hates Clemens because he’s green.
The latter is played by the excellent character actor David Dastmalchian, whose reliably over-the-top performance as the ship’s first mate suggests that he understood the low-rent nature of this production better than anyone else aboard. If “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” benefits from both the fiery-eyed seriousness and the goofy-accented cartoonishness that Hawkins and Dastmalchian bring to their respective parts role, it suffers enormously from Øvredal’s inability to keep an even keel between them.
Despite the skill he’s displayed in previous work like “The Autopsy of Jane Doe,” the “Trollhunter” director is completely at Poseidon’s mercy on this one, as his instinct for shlock rubs against a story that calls for a classicist’s touch (the inverse is also true, which makes for an unintentionally hilarious scene where CGI Dracula tries to pass himself off as a posh British gentleman). Location shooting and an ominous Bear McCreary score bring a whiff of flavor to the early scenes on dry land, but the movie begins to take on water from the moment the Demeter sets sail, as Øvredal fails to shape the musty wooden bowels of the ship into a character of their own, or to do anything else that might help texture the killings to come (there are a few errant hints as to how the Demeter’s hollow planks could have come alive, but they go mostly unexploited).
Instead, Øvredal falls back on chaos and cruelty, his movie sorely lacking the sense of dread required to justify either one. Not to be all “too much child murder, and in such small portions” about it, but if you’re going to hit below the belt, it’s only right to do so with gusto. Likewise, if you’re going to make an R-rated horror wank about Dracula slurping throats with a smile on his face, make sure that the rest of the movie doesn’t suck as hard as he does.
Grade: D
Universal Pictures will release “The Last Voyage of Demeter” in theaters on Friday, August 11.
