Monday, September 11, 2023

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

 



This Dracula is not quite the sinister charmer played by the likes of Gary Oldman and Claes Bang, but a bit more like the alien on the Nostromo. 

The movie is a sort of spin-off aspiring to be a reboot, carved from an (up to now) under-exapnded part of Stoker's tale*, the Count's less than luxurious ride to the shores of Blighty on an ill-fated vessel called the Demeter. 

I can say I rather enjoyed it with the caveat that I am almost as much a sucker for any story set on a tall ship as I am those based within large old hotels. 

The ship's course seems to be straightforward: Black Sea port, across the Med, up through the Bay of Biscay, into the channel and then a hard left into the Thames. But the script keeps throwing out navigational corkers like "we've passed the Straights of Dover and are still four days from London" and it's anyone's guess how the Demeter eventually ends up on the rocks at Whitby, though I think I once read somewhere that the Yorkshire town and its ruined Abbey inspired Stoker to write Dracula
 
* The chapter entitled The Captain's Log.


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