My friend who saw this movie with me complained that it was “too dark,” and she wasn’t referring to the tone, tenor or mood of the story. Literally, this movie was too dark. It was hard to see what was going on. Set on a creaking old cargo ship traveling from Carpathia to London with a hold full of coffins, the starless nights, stormy seas, flapping sails and scurrying rats became annoying motifs in this version of Dracula’s biopic. The passengers just got picked off one by one by the monster Dracula. There, I’ve told you the entire movie. Played by Javier Botet, a Spanish actor whose Marfan Syndrome has made him particularly well suited to creature-roles, this Dracula was just a one-dimensional predator. In real life, Botet is six feet and seven inches and weighs 127 pounds. Even so, it took some special effects wizardry to transform him into a giant winged monster with razors for teeth. But is that the way we want to envision Count Dracula? What happened to Dracula’s charm and seductive powers? What happened to the very character of Dracula — his sadness at being banished from daylight and an ordinary life, his ferocious hunger for love? It was Dracula’s humanity that made him so scary. In the best horror movies, we empathize with the monster to some degree. In this movie, the monster lacked a shred of humanity – he might as well have been a rabid dog (although Cujo was far more interesting than this wretched creature). The best Draculas ever were the original Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) and Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992). After I saw The Last Voyage of the Demeter, I re-watched Gary Oldman, and I was struck by one of the lines he delivered: “I too can love.” Dracula was at the end of the day (certainly not during the day) a lover, a seducer, a man doomed by his own desires. The monster in this movie was just someone jumping out of the shadows to scare you. Skip it and stream Gary Oldman on Amazon. https://amzn.to/3P2uf8b
