Worth Mentioning - Such a Thing Is Against Nature

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Dracula and The Nun.

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER (2023)

2023 will go down in the horror history books as the year when Universal Pictures released not just one but two separate Dracula movies – and audiences opted not to go out to see either one of them, making them box office bombs. The first was horror comedy Renfield, which co-starred Nicolas Cage as Dracula... and I’ll never understand why the promise of seeing Cage as Dracula didn’t inspire people to check that one out. The failure of the second Dracula movie is more understandable. For one thing, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is not a very appealing title. A lot of viewers are going to be hesitant to even attempt to pronounce that last word, which is pronounced like “De Meter”, and I can tell you that I was not pronouncing it correctly before I saw the movie. Plus the trailer made it look like a dark, stuffy period piece, so it might have been a bomb even with a more generic title like Blood Tide.

It actually is a bit of a stuffy period piece, being set on in 1897 and moving along at a deliberate pace that stretches it out to a 119 minute running time. But it does deserve to be seen by more horror fans, because it’s a pretty cool Dracula movie with a strong cast and was well directed by Andre Ovredal.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on one particular chapter in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, the Captain’s Log that followed the disastrous journey of a ship that happens to be transporting the vampire Dracula from Romania to England. The bloodsucker picks off the crew one by one, so there are no survivors by the time the ship delivers Dracula to his destination. We’ve seen this story brought to screen in some of the adaptations of Stoker’s work, but it has never had a whole movie dedicated to it before... which is surprising, because making such a movie was a good idea. Bragi Schut Jr. wrote the initial script, then several other writers worked on it as it spent twenty years in development hell. By the time Universal finally gave it the greenlight, Zak Olkewicz had earned a co-writing credit.

Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham, David Dastmalchian, Jon Jon Briones, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Martin Furulund, and Chris Walley play the crew members Dracula feeds on during their journey across the sea, with Woody Norman as the captain’s grandson and Aisling Franciosi as a woman who is found in a crate in the cargo hold – someone Dracula was using to snack on before he could start eating the crew.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter brings to mind the likes of Alien and The Thing while it plays out, although it never manages to reach the level of those classics. One reason why it falls short is because it never feels like the crew is fighting hard enough to protect themselves once they know an evil being is lurking around on the ship and coming out to eat them at night. They’re not the most proactive bunch. I was also underwhelmed by the portrayal of Dracula as a hideous bat-creature rather than the weird Count he is. I guess it’s scarier for the situation that he be a monster at all times, but that’s not quite my idea of Dracula. Even when you see this guy try to pass off as human, he’s way funkier than Nosferatu.

THE NUN II (2023)

While I’m a fan of The Conjuring and its sequels The Conjuring 2 and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, the spin-offs that also populate the “Conjuring Universe” are more of a mixed bag for me. I didn’t like the first Annabelle, but the prequel Annabelle: Creation was a huge step up – before Annabelle Comes Home took a step back down. I wasn't blown away by The Nun and haven’t watched it since its theatrical run five years ago. All I remember about it is that it involved a nun played by Taissa Farmiga and a priest played by Demián Bichir investigating supernatural attacks on nuns in Romania, and that the ending was lifted straight out of Demon Knight. I was so unimpressed by The Nun, I had next-to-zero interest in The Nun II... but I decided to give it a chance. Annabelle: Creation had been an improvement over its predecessor, so maybe the same would happen here.

Well, as it turns out, I did enjoy The Nun II more than the first movie. I just didn’t enjoy it a lot more.

One thing that gave me hope for this follow-up was the fact that it was written by Akela Cooper (as well as Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing), and Cooper had previously been responsible for the madness of Malignant and M3GAN. So I thought she might deliver something that was more appealing to me. It was also directed by Michael Chaves, who directed The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and the universe-adjacent The Curse of La Llorona.... but while Cooper and the other writers did type up some wild action moments, Chaves disappointed me by making the image ridiculously dark, something a lot of directors seem to like doing these days. I remember that not so long ago directors had faith that they would be able to scare the audience while still making sure the image on the screen was well lit. It’s true, there are scary classics where you can actually see what’s going on, unlike moments in The Nun II.

Set four years after the events of the previous movie, The Nun II finds that a character from the first movie, Maurice (played by Jonas Bloquet) is now working as handyman at a girls’ boarding school in France – a setting somewhat reminiscent of the girls’ home in Annabelle: Creation. I honestly don’t remember Maurice from The Nun, even though when I wrote about the movie I mentioned liking him, finding him fun and amusing. I guess people who liked the movie more than I did might remember him better. It quickly becomes apparent to us that the demonic entity, which really likes to take on the image of a nun while tormenting people, has attached itself to Maurice and is using him to try to achieve some sort of goal while brutally murdering people he comes in contact with. When word of the murders reaches Taissa Farmiga’s Sister Irene, she once again heads out into the field to deal with this demon problem, now accompanied by fellow nun Sister Debra (Storm Reid).

The body count climbs, the nun freaks people out, a monstrous goat rampages around the boarding school. The movie is mildly enjoyable, despite the fact that every light source in every room is shockingly weak. I’m not likely to ever feel compelled to watch the movie again, especially since it felt really long despite being less than 110 minutes, but it was an okay way to spend some time in the midst of the Halloween season.