Taking "The Captain's Log", a chapter from Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and adapting it into this film, Last Voyage of the Demeter follows the titular ship as it travels from Romania to England with it's mysterious cargo. Said cargo of course ends up being a vampiric demon, who slowly murders the crew one by one, becoming stronger as he does. The rapidly dwindling crew need to work out what the are dealing with, and hope... or pray that they can make it to their destination alive.
I was quite excited about this film leading up to release, hearing it being billed as basically 'Alien on a boat', and whereas I can see why it was labelled as such, sadly the two films are worlds apart in terms of quality.
As far as visuals are concerned, Demeter looks great. The ship looks moody and forboding with a suitable isolating atmosphere, and the effects on Dracula himself are excellent, being just the right blend of practical and CGI. The performances are also pretty good, with the tensions between the crew reaching boiling point when half of them are convinced a demon is on board, and the other half refuse to believe that, thinking one of them is a murderer. That's actually quite brilliant.
Where the film starts to fall down is on its pacing. Once Dracula appears (and he appears quite early on) and he takes his first victim, the tension doesn't really ramp up with each subsequent kill. The film more or less stays in second gear, with it doing isolated kill after isolated kill over and over in more of less the same way until only a handful remain. The pacing is somewhat glacial throughout the whole film, which hurts it significantly, with it doing more or less the same thing over and over. The ending shot is quite cool though, but it really needed to ramp up the excitement in the final third and it just... doesn't.
However, I still enjoyed the film for the most part, and if you like horror or anything to do with Dracula it's worth a look. It's just a pity that it falls a bit short...
I was quite excited about this film leading up to release, hearing it being billed as basically 'Alien on a boat', and whereas I can see why it was labelled as such, sadly the two films are worlds apart in terms of quality.
As far as visuals are concerned, Demeter looks great. The ship looks moody and forboding with a suitable isolating atmosphere, and the effects on Dracula himself are excellent, being just the right blend of practical and CGI. The performances are also pretty good, with the tensions between the crew reaching boiling point when half of them are convinced a demon is on board, and the other half refuse to believe that, thinking one of them is a murderer. That's actually quite brilliant.
Where the film starts to fall down is on its pacing. Once Dracula appears (and he appears quite early on) and he takes his first victim, the tension doesn't really ramp up with each subsequent kill. The film more or less stays in second gear, with it doing isolated kill after isolated kill over and over in more of less the same way until only a handful remain. The pacing is somewhat glacial throughout the whole film, which hurts it significantly, with it doing more or less the same thing over and over. The ending shot is quite cool though, but it really needed to ramp up the excitement in the final third and it just... doesn't.
However, I still enjoyed the film for the most part, and if you like horror or anything to do with Dracula it's worth a look. It's just a pity that it falls a bit short...