The Last Voyage Of The Demeter

Please Demeter

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter
USA/UK/Canada/India/Germany/
Italy/Sweden/Switzerland/Malta 2023
Directed by André Øvredal
Universal/Amblin

Warning: Slight spoilers nipping at your neck.

The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, directed by André Øvredal who gave us Troll Hunter (reviewed by me here) and The Autopsy Of Jane Doe (reviewed here), is a film I’ve been wanting to see on these shores for a while now. It was due for a cinema release in the UK last year (as it got everywhere else, it would seem) but Lionsgate, who were to be the distributors over here, suddenly pulled it and themselves out of the UK market altogether at that time (is what I’ve read but I’m sure I’ve seen their logo on stuff since then). So it never got a general release over here... not at the cinema nor on physical media (and I suspect not on streaming yet, either). So I just got fed up waiting and took a route to see it which, to be fair, was available to me even a month or so before the film was originally due to be released... I just wanted to see it at a cinema at the time. But, don’t worry, I will be giving some money back to the company at some point soon because I will definitely be shipping over a US Blu Ray of this one pretty sharpish (when I can afford the exorbitant postage that country charges these days).

Okay, so if you don’t recognise the reference in the title... well it’s more than spelled out in the opening of the film but, basically, this is a take on the events that happened from the captain’s log of the Demeter, on its journey taking 50 boxes of soil from Transylvania to where it washed up as a wreck at Whitby in Yorkshire. As told via a brief section of logs in Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Now, the film is well made and well acted by the likes of Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi and genre star Liam Cunningham as the Captain of the Demeter. That being said, if you’re a Dracula purist, then you should be forewarned that, although the start and end point are pretty much the same... the film does take some liberties with the events as described in Stoker’s original novel. So, yeah... don’t expect a verbatim adaptation of those paragraphs within the chapter. They... sort of match up.

That out of the way... when did a screen version of the Dracula story (even a small part of it such as this) ever match up to the original Stoker very well anyway (not very often, truth be told)? So, it’s a good addition to the body of cinematic Dracula tales over the years and, as it happens, one of the more competent and entertaining ones. The writers on this one have managed to populate the story with some likeable characters you will absolutely care about when confronted with peril and, it’s a quite likeable horror romp, to be sure. There are even a few jump scares thrown into the mix.

And let’s not forget the look of the Dracula ‘creature’ in this. He’s quite obviously based on the Count Orlock variant version as seen in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror in 1922 and various other iterations of the character taking that classic look over the years. Indeed there’s a remake of Nosferatu hitting screens again at the end of this year. And the creature here is realised very well. I was a little worried about how they were going to marry up the beast here with what Dracula was going on to do when he got to England but the epilogue of the story, so to speak, shows him blending into things quite nicely. However, unlike the original version of Nosferatu and the 1931 version of Dracula, there is no Renfield character in this iteration.

Now there are a few clichés thrown into the mix. For instance, as soon as you see there’s a ship’s dog, you just know he’s going to be one of the vampire’s first snacks. And sure enough, the dog along with all the livestock are slaughtered fairly early on in the picture (thus destroying the crew’s meat rations in the process). But, there is also a young kid in this too and, a big round of applause to the film makers for not doing the usual and having him spared the horror of the voyage. He actually comes to a very gruesome end at some point (yeah, that’s the spoiler folks... you were warned). To be fair, though, if you’ve read the novel you’ll know there are no survivors (even though there’s a big ‘well actually’ moment for the film... perhaps the producers wanted a sequel but... hmm... they’ll need to do a prequel too, to do it properly).

But, lots of nice shots, with a nice colour palette and lots of creaking sound effects, as the ship goes on its journey and various, diminishing crewmen are picked off one by one as they stand watch each night. Unfortunately, not all the laws of vampire mythology seem to hold sway here. Yes, sunlight burns and kills those poor souls that Dracula has started drinking and so he and the majority of his prey (those who are not having regular blood transfusions... it gets complicated, okay?) only come out when the sun is down. Having said that, though, cruciforms/crosses seem to have absolutely no effect on the creature at all. Similarly, the crew underestimate it all the way through by not being familiar with the various vampire laws and traditions, such as a modern cinematic audience is... so pretty much all of their time they believe shooting this creature will be their salvation.

But, any inconsistencies with the source material aside... I had a really good time with The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, it has to be said. I’m going up to the first day of the 2024 Frigthfest later today (at time of writing), where there is actually a lone, subtitled for hard of hearing print being shown as a ‘one off’ over the course of the five days (although I’ve not got a ticket to that one myself) so I’m hoping some nice stall holder has got a US Blu Ray of it in his merchandise stall, if I’m lucky.* Either way, this is one of the better of the current crop of vampire films being made these days and I’d thoroughly recommend this one to fans of that subgenre. Much fangs for this one.

*No such luck but a postage free copy from WOW HD arrived through my door a few days ago.

Troll Hunter (aka Trolljegeren)

Trollduggery!

Troll Hunter (aka Trolljegeren) 2010 Norway

Directed by André Øvredal

Screening at UK cinemas

Warning: There are spoilers, foll-di-roll... and they’re going to eat you for dinner!

Blimey, another one. Three cinema movies in one weekend and two of them, including this one, turn out to be first-person POV pseudomentary “found footage” movies. This one’s pretty amazing though and wins over some of it’s predecessors by introducing a strong dose of tongue-in-cheek humour to the proceedings.

Three students making a film about bear hunters for their college course latch on to a shady character who is a little out of place and start following him around and pestering him. When they follow him into a “prohibited” forest they soon find out, in no uncertain and humorously terrifying terms, that he is a government sanctioned specialist in and hunter of... trolls.

When I saw the first shot bear with its tongue hanging comically out I thought to myself... wow, that looks really fake. What I didn’t realise then was that there is a government conspiracy of hiding the trolls and keeping them in specially “restricted from the public” areas and that the dead bears are imported "plants" so they can pass off accidental troll related human deaths as bear incidents. After a while you realise that the key people in charge of this operation are... well... not very good at their jobs. Which figures I guess. Most people in local government are not very good at their jobs so it does have a ring of truth about it. The only true professional is the troll hunter himself... and he wants the truth about the existence of trolls to be known by the general public at large.

The strength of this movie is that, amidst all the quite broad humour, there is a genuine air of threat and terror when it comes to the trolls themselves. And it’s actually an incredibly hard tightrope act to pull off, especially when the trolls themselves do actually resemble the fairytale troll imagery you have in your head right at this very moment as you read these words. Big, broad muppety looking things which want to make you laugh out loud... except, if the cameraman stops to laugh he’s going to get eaten or worse and so... well, this movie is a bit of a masterpiece because it really does straddle that line very effectively.

It’s got quite a long slow burn at the start where nothing happens much just to build up the atmosphere of the piece and when the genuine trollduggery starts happening, you really feel it. You’ll be running in terror with the cameraman as you laugh at the trolls. The found footage style of the camerawork really does help sell the trolls too. I would imagine if you were seeing these beasts in a more controlled camera environment with slow pans and dollys etc. then you’d have your brain telling you how inappropriate and unrealistic these things look... but because you’re looking at CGI in a camera style which you associate with the hasty. on the fly, quick and dirty recording of reality, the effects kind of sell themselves better in your mind and it’s really easy to believe in these trolls... even when one of them has three heads.

The mixture of the comic and “scarying up” is just amazingly well handled. One scene, for instance, has the troll hunter dressed in some man made armour which looks totally ineffective as he tries to get a blood sample from a troll... baiting the troll up from under a bridge by splashing around a bucket of the “blood of a Christian man”. This is pretty funny and the armour looks useless... but then the scene turns terrifying as the troll knocks the hunter out and tries to eat him but is stymied by the armour.

This really is a great little gem of a low budget horror movie but it also has some slight disappointments. Number one disappointment is that in all these kinds of POV films the movie-makers try to impress you by killing or eating the cameraman at some point in the film and it’s become almost something of a cliché with them now. Troll Hunter is no exception to this and, while it’s nice to get a fresh perspective and be “in on the joke” of the replacement camerawoman not believing in trolls... it is kind of expected now and I wish they’d have done something different with it. Also, there’s a nice little account of a battle between warring factions of trolls and the aftermath of such a battle where thay were all hurling rocks at each other. I would have loved to have seen this battle, or at the very least been witness to a fight between two trolls instead of just teasing the audience with an account of such shenanigans. I guess the budget probably wouldn’t have allowed for that but once that story had been told... I was mentally rubbing my hands together with glee just waiting for it to happen. So was a tad let down that this kind of sequence wasn’t included.

But these very minor grumbles are just that... minor grumbles. There are some great moments in troll hunter, not least of which are when the title character goes to see his (implied) girlfriend who is a vet specialising in troll physiology and you get to hear some really humorous scientific explanations to explain some of the well known mythical facts about trolls (like why sunlight can turn older trolls to stone). Very funny.

I can’t do anything but recommend Troll Hunter as it’s one of the better POV movies of recent years, although it’s true I’m a sucker for watching films shot in this style anyway (even though most of them, this one included, don’t have a proper soundtrack). Better get to watch it before the US remake, which is already planned, manages to completely miss the point and wreck what is a nice little, low budget comedy horror flick. I just hope the original Norwegian team manage to capitalise on this first one with a sequel which actually does show a full scale troll battle. Now that, I’d really like to see.