Voyage of the Demeter could be most terrifying Dracula yet
In the most heart-pounding scene of the film, an eight-year-old boy is locked in the captain’s cabin as the ravenous vampire prowls the ship.
Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★½
Drac is back and he’s old school and he’s terrifying. The Transylvanian count in the bloodcurdling Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter is a lot different to some of his previous incarnations.
He’s not George Hamilton’s debonair vampire of Love at First Bite (1979) or the African bloodsucker in Blacula (1972). (When it comes to black Dracs, Morgan Freeman had a bite around the same time, in the children’s TV series The Electric Company).
He’s far less sartorial than the late, great screen Dracs Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. No red-lined black cloak – or any clothing at all – for him.
The Drac he comes closest to is Max Schreck’s in the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, FW Murnau’s masterpiece of German expressionism.
He may not even be a he or a she. This evil presence has a skeletal male face, snaggled, pre-fluoride fangs, claw-like nails, wings and a reptilian look. It is “the thing that wears the skin of a man”.
The actor inside that skin (all make-up and acting, no CGI) is Javier Botet from Spain, who specialises in monsters. In his previous film for the same director, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), he is The Toeless Corpse. The director, Andre Ovredal from Norway, also likes making horror movies. Together he and his Drac make a great team, alongside the director’s regular cinematographer Roman Osin.
They faced an interesting challenge with this film as it is based on a single chapter in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. How does one turn 10 pages into a two-hour film?
The answer is simple and the result is impressive. They make stuff up.
Dracula is an epistolary novel and the chapter in question, The Captain’s Log, is the diary of the captain of the Russian merchant ship Demeter as it sails from Romania to London.
As such it’s short on bits and pieces that films tend to need, such as dialogue. The director and screenwriters Bragi Schut Jr and Zak Olkewicz fix this by introducing new characters and having them talk to each other.
That decision also introduces tantalising uncertainties to the story. Having read Dracula does not guarantee you will know what happens in this movie.
The main new character is an English doctor, Clemens (Corey Hawkins from The Walking Dead), who is a last-minute addition to the crew of the ship. He has a degree from Cambridge but the colour of his skin is a barrier to finding a job.
Another newcomer is eight-year-old Toby (Woody Norman), grandson of the ship’s captain (Liam Cunningham from Game of Thrones). In the most heart-pounding scene of the film, he is locked in the captain’s cabin as the ravenous “thin man”, as he is called in the novel, prowls the ship.
There’s also a female stowaway, or so the crew thinks, who comes from Dracula’s homeland. The crew believe a woman on board is an ill omen, yet it’s Anna (Irish actor Aisling Franciosi) who offers advice they should heed: “He’s here. We have to get off this boat.”
The first mate (David Dastmalchian) disagrees. For him and the captain, the boat is their life. The director, cinematographer and music director (Bear McCreary) show a sailor’s life in all its beauty and terror: the claustrophobic quarters, the angry skies, the tempestuous seas. And then there’s this winged arterialoholic splattering the white sails red.
Why is Dracula on the Demeter? That is explained. It’s also worth noting that Demeter is the Greek goddess of harvest. “He’s rationing,’’ says Anna, in an other astute observation.
This is one of the best Dracula films I’ve seen recently. I like the humorous Renfield (2023), with Nicolas Cage as Drac, but this is a different movie. It’s about the horror of a life-sucking devil who kills not just for sustenance but for pleasure.
I particularly like that the filmmakers do not hold back, as the MA15+ rating suggests. There’s eight-year-old Toby. There’s the ship’s dog, Huckleberry. There’s the young woman Anna. There’s the captain on his final voyage who has plans to retire to Ireland. There’s the rest of the crew, with their hopes and dreams. And there’s Count Dracula.
Strays (MA15+)
In cinemas
★
Here’s the nose-to-tail plotline of the adults-only comedy Strays. A dog is abandoned by his owner, a bong-pulling, beer-guzzling, jerk-off (that bit is metaphorical and literal).
He meets a stray who introduces him to two other homeless dogs. The pack of four decides to hunt down the bad human and bite off his penis.
How do you stretch this into a 90-minute movie? First, make mangy jokes about dogs pooping, pissing and humping sofas and repeat them every five minutes or so, as you might need to do with a short-attention-span mutt.
Second, dig up the road-trip tropes, the more cliched the better, such as a run-in with the law and a stint behind bars. Third, have the dogs swear their heads off. Here’s an example that underscores the MA15+ rating: “I have rabies, scabies … and whatever disease you can get from tongue-f..king a dead squirrel, as I did last night.’’
On hearing that line, 10 minutes in, I wondered how on earth it made the final cut. The next 80 minutes, which include a meditation on canine cunnilingus, answered that question.
It’s spoken by Jamie Foxx, who voices the stray, a Boston terrier named Bug. I like to think of him reading the script and asking, “Do you realise I have an Oscar?” If he did, no one listened.
The scriptwriter, Dan Perrault, who wrote the award-winning true crime mockumentary American Vandal (2017-18), is off the leash and it’s not pretty. The director, Josh Greenbaum, made a 2017 documentary about Australia’s one-shot 007, George Lazenby.
The other main characters are Reggie the abandoned border terrier (Will Ferrell), an Australian shepherd named Maggie (Isla Fisher), a Great Dane with a huge penis (as we are told 100 times and shown more often than I needed to see) named Hunter (Randall Park) and the hound-hating owner (Will Forte).
The canine roles are a combination of real dogs and special effects. The result isn’t as bad as the CGI-ed Buck in Call of the Wild (2020) but nor is it far off it.
That film starred Harrison Ford. In this one, Dennis Quaid pops up for a few minutes solely to remind us that he is Dennis Quaid. There is no other explanation for his presence.
There’s a lot of buzz about Barbie and Oppenheimer riding to the rescue of cinemas. The barkingly bad Strays, distributed by the same studio as those fine films, is a reminder of why that rescue is needed.
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