Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ on Paramount+, a Dracula-at-Sea Yarn

Dracula takes to the high seas in The Last Voyage of the Demeter (now streaming on Paramount+, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), but he isn’t a pirate, which feels like a missed opportunity to me. No, this dim-lit crudola of a genre exercise hews to Bram Stoker’s original novel, specifically the “Captain’s Log” chapter, about how the bloodsucker slurps from the jugulars of seafaring types on a trip from his native Romania to London. Why is he making this journey? Don’t ask. A more pertinent question might be why a talented cast, led by Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton), Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) and Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), can’t bring any life to this movie, which is dead in the water like, um, I guess, Dracula on a boat. 

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1897. A ship wrecks off the coast of England, and the first lad to investigate is shocked speechless by what he sees on board. Cut to a scene FOUR WEEKS EARLIER in Romania, where Captain Elliot (Cunningham) crews up his vessel, the Demeter, for a trek to Jolly Ol’. Some suspicious-looking crates are loaded aboard the ship, and a scarfaced, mottle-eyed, filthy-ass seaman – are there any late-19th-century seamen who aren’t scarfaced, mottle-eyed and filthy-ass? – spots the dragon sigil on the side and vamooses right the eff outta there. Smart move, superstitious grubby man! He smells the shit that’s coming from a mile away, just like we do. Now’s a good time to get off this ship, so to speak, potential movie-watchers!

But some of us must stay, because if one doesn’t endure, one cannot warn others off. We meet our protagonist, Clemens (Hawkins), as he seeks passage back home to London. He’s a doctor and he can do other things, too. Elliot brings him aboard and all the crew look at him sideways except Elliot’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman of C’mon C’mon). Toby gives Clemens a tour of the livestock and introduces him to other seafaring men, thus laying out all the things and people who are about to get killed. A day or three into the trip, some clunking and weirdness begins happening at night. Clemens finds a stowaway woman on board, Anna (Franciosi), pale and near death; he gives her a blood transfusion to save her life even though everyone else on board wants to feed her to the barracuda and sea cucumbers, citing her potential for infecting others, the lack of rations for another hungry mouth and, most convincingly, how a woman on a ship is bad luck. Sailors! Aren’t they a hoot.

Worse luck is having Dracula stashed in the cargo hold waiting to come out at night to glug some blood, but to be fair, they don’t know that yet. First he slaughters all the pigs and goats, just to get everyone in a tizzy, kicking off a repetitive string of nightly incidents followed by Grave Concern the following morning. Anna awakes from her miserable slumber to mutter vague things about impending doom; one assumes she’s still groggy and can’t quite formulate the words DRACULA ON BOARD ABANDON SHIP. Meanwhile, the presence of a great and mighty evil instills everyone on board with crushing fear and even more crushing stupidity. I mean, they don’t even think to check out the ominous box downstairs, which all but says DO NOT DISTURB – DRACULA SLEEPING on it, or do any investigating during the day, because if anything in this movie happens beneath decent lighting, I don’t think it really counts.   

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Demeter is Master and Commander meets Dracula 2000, although I think Sharkula might match that same description?

Performance Worth Watching: Oof – there’s a lot of thankless work here. Hawkins shows he’s capable of anchoring a movie, and Franciosi and Cunningham deliver a little gravitas, but this screenplay is a half-ton hunk of cement chained to their ankles and tossed into the Aegean.  

Memorable Dialogue: Clemens asks why the Count himself is going to London, and Anna replies, “Because in my country there is no one left to feed on.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So you’re saying the entire population of Romania has been totally vampirized? (Or is that vampirified?) I guess Dracula’s been busy! That might’ve made for a better movie, considering The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a pointless and dreary waste of time, a nearly two-hour-long patience-tester that feels like a rejiggered project set adrift in the wake of the failed Dark Universe experiment. Director Andre Ovredal (Trollhunters, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) isn’t a hack, but he comes tantalizingly close to Uwe Boll territory thanks to some crummy CGI, wearisome jump scares and a prevailing visual murk that renders the action indecipherable. 

The set design looks pretty good when someone finally turns on the damn lights, but that’s just me fishing around for something, anything, good to say about this deadly snoozer. It doesn’t generate any excitement or intrigue or suspense, and approaches character development as a why-bother-they’re-all-gonna-get-killed-anyway endeavor. (The best it does is give Anna some haunted fatalism, show Elliot’s affection for his grandkid and toss in a perfunctory reveal about the racism Clemens has endured.) Speaking of, the kills are weak, offering brief glimpses of slashy gore that make you wonder why nobody decided to lean a little heavier into the R rating. This suckass movie stops just short of Dracula stooping over to sink his fangs into someone’s gluteus. I grab The Last Voyage of the Demeter by the lapels, draw it in close and yawn stinky sour-cream-and-onion-potato-chip yawns right in its face. 

Our Call: Nosfera-too bad this movie is boring and terrible! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.