It’s been a big moviegoing summer for yours portly, and I’ve availed myself of the offerings at my local cinema quite frequently.  While I was still on summer vacation I managed to slip into a 4 PM showing of The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), a film about the doomed ship that carried Count Dracula to England in the original Bram Stoker novel.

I was hoping for a delightfully blood-soaked (and blood-thirsty) romp on the high seas, blending the manliness of stoic sailors in the waning days of the Age of Sail with the Gothic horror of old-school Dracula.  Instead, I got a disappointingly plodding film and a stomach ache from eating too much popcorn, albeit with a pretty terrifying depiction of the dreaded Count.

The Last Voyage of Demeter draws from “The Captain’s Log” chapter of Dracula, and the film opens with coastal authorities in England coming upon the wreck of the titular ship.  One of the police officers reads the captain log, which moves the film to Bulgaria, four weeks earlier.

The crew of the Demeter are loading up a mysterious cargo (spoiler alert: it’s Dracula), for which they will be paid a considerable bonus if they can get it to England in a timely fashion.  The protagonist of the story, Clemens, overhears the first mate looking for sailors, and puts himself forth as a capable ship’s doctor, but is brushed off.  After saving the captain’s grandson from a falling crate, however, the mate reconsiders and begrudgingly allows Clemens to crew up.

Here’s where the film almost immediately takes audiences out of the otherwise fun and foreboding setup:  Clemens is black.  That’s not a problem, per se—colorblind casting is one fine, and while it stretches credulity to see a black doctor with an English accent in Bulgaria in 1897, one could argue that the actor (Corey Hawkins) was simply the best man for the job.  But the script harps on Clemens’s race—constantly.  He’s repeatedly insulted because he’s black, and is underestimated for the same reason.  That might actually be historically accurate, but the nature of the insults, as well as Clemens’s responses to them, are straight out of 2023 Wokeness’s idea of what “racism” looks like today.

What’s not historically accurate is that Clemens boasts of being an Oxford-trained physician who couldn’t get work in England because of his skin color.  He went to Bulgaria hoping to get work with the local nobility, but they rejected him after taking one look at his chocolatey complexion.  Do you see how the film is just hammering us with the race stuff?  Isn’t this flick supposed to be about a vampire on a boat?

(Side note:  the first black student at Oxford University was Christian Cole, a Sierra Leonean adopted by a Church of England minister in the colony.  He graduated in 1877 with a law degree and wrote a book about the Zulu War, calling himself, “A Negro, B.A.” in the author’s line.  Rather than being the source of derision and scorn, his fellow Oxford students and the people of England helped support him financially after his uncle’s death, and seemed to find him an intriguing oddity—as he would have been in lily white 1870s England.  He also taught music lessons!)

I could rant on and on about casting black actors in historical roles that would most likely have been white Europeans, but that’s what the terrorists want me to do.  What I take issue with here is not that the scriptwriters have created a black physician in the 1890s in Europe, but that they’ve made so much of his race.  Instead of watching a slow-moving film about Dracula picking off crew members one-by-one, I’m watching a slow-moving film about Dracula picking off crew members one-by-one with a heavy-handed message about racial justice.

Even with that blackety-blackness removed from the movie, it came across as… boring.  There was maybe one moment of genuine suspense in the film (and, to their credit, they went there—the captain’s grandson gets the blood sucked out of him!).  The movie was boring, and I found myself checking my phone in the middle of it.

The boringness is a symptom, in part, of the aforementioned wokery, but also of the film’s runtime.  The Last Voyage of the Demeter clocks in at just under two hours, and the story would have been much better served if it had been trimmed to a tight ninety minutes.  Sure, Oppenheimer (2023) can get away with being three hours, but what happened to the classic ninety-minute film?  I miss the days of tight, well-written stories.

That said, the film isn’t all bad.  I enjoyed the setting.  The Demeter feels dark and claustrophobic, but also warm and inviting.  As the crew members die off one-by-one, the sense of frustration and anxiety set in.  The men debate whether to stop the voyage and lose everything; stop at a local port to unload the sick and dying, and risk losing the massive bonus; or soldier on in spite of everything, knowing the payout will be even bigger per man as the others die off.  The money is a major motivation for the crew to keep going, even as their situation grows increasingly desperate.  Running low on food (Dracula killed all of the livestock on board first thing) and crew, they become increasingly erratic and suspicious of one another.

I was really hoping The Last Voyage of the Demeter would be like John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (1982):  no one being sure who they could trust, not knowing who might become a blood-sucking monster at any moment.  It had the potential to be that, but instead it fell into all the modern movie clichés:  an aggrieved black protagonist; lots of shouting in defiance at an unstoppable evil in attempt to create tension and climax; and a Girl Who is the Key to Everything.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention the lass on board.  In snooping around below decks, Clemens uncovers Anna, a woman carried onto the ship via one of Dracula’s crate.  She was intended to be one of Dracula’s meals, but Clemens manages to administer a blood transfusion (not perfected until the Second World War, by the way) and keeps her alive, even as the crewmembers say, “a woman is bad luck on a ship” and suspect her for the sudden deaths.  Anna ends up being an overpowered Mary Sue who somehow resists Dracula’s attacks even as she’s suffering from blood loss and creeping vampirism.  Cue the aforementioned “shouting in defiance” scenes.

Why do modern movies do that—have a character shouting a self-righteous monologue at the villain?  Has anyone else noticed this unfortunate trend?  It’s another one of those elements that just takes me out of the world the filmmakers are trying to create.

But I digress.  The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a squandered opportunity.  It could have been The Thing at sea.  Instead, it was another generic thriller with too few thrills and too many sermons to the audience.