Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

Saw The Last Voyage of the Demeter tonight. For those who haven’t read Bram Stoker’s book, the Demeter is the ship what ran aground in the London harbor with no surviving crew. Little did the investigating constabulary know, this ship carried in its cargo the vampir nosferato known as Dracula.
Not much is mentioned regarding what actually happened on the Demeter leading to the missing crew and it’s subsequent running aground. This film takes liberties to greatly flesh out that aspect of the story.

Don’t let the hard rock music in the trailer lead you to believe this is a teeny-bopper slasher flick. I would not have been interested were that the case. This plays out like a period film with much attention to historical detail. I was impressed that they would refer to Saint Nicholas as the patron Saint of sailors. Not many remember this fact about Santa Claus.
Don’t get me wrong though. There were enough jump scares to keep the lady sitting two seats down from me from snoring.
It’s not without its moments of gore either but it never seems gratuitous.

In the book Dracula, the characters had the expertise of Abraham VanHelsing who seemed well versed is vampír lore. They didn’t really have this advantage in Demeter which really added to the mysterious nature of the antagonist.

I liked the film but with the scenario such as it must be, it becomes very similar to an old film called Alien starring Sigourney Weaver. Just replace the xenomorph with Dracula and WHAMO! Same plot. Well not really. But it was fun to make that comparison.
I’ll say, it was nice to see something based on classic literature as opposed to a ride in Disneyland or another version of iron man. Unfortunately that also means this film probably won’t do too well in the box office. It was worth the watch. Not for kids or the feint though.