The Last Voyage of the Demeter

What a great movie. To be honest, I liked it more than "Nosferatu (2024)".

The Last Voyage of the Demeter, nope. They had to do it didn't they? A movie about the ship that brought Dracula to England in the late 19th Century and... modern day political messaging. They were like, nope, we can't just make a Dracula movie, we have to push ***THE MESSAGE*** and honestly, that's what killed it. No one wants that. They don't want the racial politics, they just wanted Dracula killing people on a boat in the 1880s. Instead what they got was Dracula killing people on a boat, Black people are smarter and more capable than white people, pushing the political message. You don't really want that. You literally just want to see Dracula killing people on a boat. You already know they are going to lose. You already know they are all going to die. The movie doesn't even have to be good, it just has to be gory fun. But they decided that they had to have ***THE MESSAGE*** more than cheap gore and horror violence.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter has a huge amount of wasted potential. The setting is atmospheric and the cast is decent. The real downside to it is that it shows way too much way too early. The suspense and mystery is killed by completely unveiling the "bad guy" in the first third of the movie and it unfortunately devolves into a B-movie adjacent creature flick from there on. I'm not one to complain about characters making dumb choices for the sake of the story in a horror movie, but I think this one really turns it up to eleven. I don't recall a single film in recent memory that had the main characters make such consistently wrong decisions throughout and it kinda turned into eye rolling in the last third. Overall I really wanted to like it, because the setting and theme was intriguing. It's not a horrible movie by any means, but it's a shame to see how close it came to being good, just to end up being pulled back into mediocrity.