in

The Old Vampire and the Sea

[ad_1]



“A poor ignorant soul trying to do his duty” is how the doomed captain of Demeter refers to himself in the cargo ship’s log that forms part of Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula—Francis Ford Coppola’s R-rated 1992 adaptation that among the novel’s many, many, many film translations hews most closely to the multi-narrator, epistolic viewpoint of Stoker’s immortal 1897 novel—the journey of the ship that carried 50 crates of Transylvanian dirt (and one undead Transylvanian count) from Romania to England gets only three minutes of screen time, intercut with other strange and sexy portents in London as Dracula sails ever closer to his port of call.

It wouldn’t take a genius to come up with the notion of expanding this not-even-one-full-chapter of Stoker’s book into a sort of Victorian remake of Alien set (mostly) in the Mediterranean Sea. And to be sure, there’s little genius to be found in Norwegian horrormeister André Øvredal’s dutiful execution of this premise, from a screenplay by Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz. Their movie ain’t half-bad, and it’s rarely more than half-good. It might’ve registered as a little more than half-good if Universal and DreamWorks had waited until the chilly weeks of October to unleash it upon us, but the long daylight of August shows this thing up for the earnestly performed, more-spooky-than-scary, profoundly forgettable programmer that it is.

About that earnestness: This Demeter is crewed with familiar and capable actors who never quite popped hard enough to establish themselves as leads. Corey Hawkins, who played the young Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton and Macduff in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, is Clemens, a sympathetic young physician who needs a lift back to London. (It seems the Romanian who hired him by mail was displeased to find a Black man knocking on his door.) He’s as easy to like as he is hard to remember. Same with Game of ThronesLiam Cunningham, who brings a stern-but-fair authority to his role as Eliot, the graybeard sea captain who has resolved to pass the reins to Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), his loyal first mate, once the Demeter reaches London. 

Joining this moveable feast of “That Guy”s is That Girl Aisling Franciosi, another GoT alumnus. She comes up with something a little deeper than one-dimensional victimhood as Anna, a native of the Carpathian Mountains whom Dracula has smuggled aboard as a sort of walking bloodbag for whenever he needs to top off. (He never drinks … wine, you’ll no doubt recall.)

The trope of a Black person being the first to expire in a horror film has already been subverted and parodied to death, as it were, and Øvredal and the writers wisely abjure it without comment. Elsewhere, they iterate the familiar beats of the genre without even trying to subvert them, unless shock-value rug pulls count. I warn you that Huck, Demeter’s canine crewmember who is by any standard a Very Good Boy, suffers a fate far worse than that of Jones, the cat from Alien. And if that’s dealbreaker for you, we needn’t even discuss what happens to Woody Norman’s Toby, Captain Eliot’s moppet grandson. No actual children (or dogs) were harmed during the production of this Major Motion Picture, probably.



[ad_2]

Source link

What do you think?

Written by enovate

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings

Best of D.C. 2023: People & Places

Best of D.C. 2023 Is Here!