The Media Tourist

A chapter from ‘Dracula’ takes wing with a lean, mean monster out for blood on the high seas

The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Starring Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham & David Dastmalchain
Directed by André Øvredal
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Aug. 18

Everyone’s favorite vampire is back on the big screen, and this time the count is down for some real dirty work.

Dracula, the title character of British author Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic tale about the aristocratic Romanian blood sucker, has fed the voracious appetites of pop culture for more than a century, appearing in some 200 films. One of the first, director Max Schreck’s iconic German silent film Nosferatu, spooked audiences in 1922; one of the most recent, the campy Renfeld earlier this year, featured Nicholas Cage sporting the familiar fangs.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on a single chapter from Stoker’s Dracula, about how Drac made the fateful hop from the European mainland to London in the late 1800s by hitching a ride on the schooner Demeter. Things didn’t end well for the Demeter, as we learn on a dark and stormy night (of course!) at the very beginning of the movie.

The recovery of the captain’s day-to-day log unspools the story; think of it as the original Vampire Diaries, detailing how Dracula got onto the ship (sneaky!), lurked in the shadows and then wrecked all kinds of hellish havoc every night after the sun went down. If you think of Dracula as a dapper, seductive, cape-draped gentleman aristrocrat—as embodied cinematically by Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee—well, get ready for a reset. This Drac is a real monster, a lean, mean, gargoyle-like winged creature with a mouthful of spiked teeth and a thirst that can only be quenched with blood. No neck is safe when he’s around. He’s not an animal, exactly, but not human, either. He’s referred to as one point as a “thing that wears the skin of a man.” If you need some new fodder for your nightmares, here it is.

The captain and the crew, we find out, were slow to catch on when they on-boarded a shipment of big wooden (coffin-like) crates in Bulgaria. When things start to get messy on the Demeter, in the middle of the Mediterranean, terrible things begin to happen, they cast about for explanations. Maybe it’s God’s wrath for their sins; perhaps it’s the bad luck, or curse, of having a woman—a female “stowaway”—on board. It’s 45 minutes into the movie before anyone even brings up Dracula’s name; this is one of those movies where the audience knows long before the characters figure it out. Maybe the captain and crew should have paid more attention to all those ominous crates embossed with the crest of a snarling dragon—and, I swear, with what looks like a big, capital “D” smeared on the sides.

Norwegian director André Øvredal leans into the mood of the story—dark, dangerous and deadly—that makes the most of its soggy setting. The Demeter is damp, cramped and claustrophobic, with old wood, scampering rats and working conditions that would never pass an OSHA inspection. But to the sailors, it’s home, and now they have an uninvited guest threatening to turn their ship into a sarcophagus. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to be with a vampire on the loose, especially when Drac gets down to business. Even kids, dogs and other animals aren’t safe. This Dracula is a carnivore who doesn’t care where the next meaty meal comes from.

Corey Hawkins (from TV’s The Walking Dead and 24: Legacy) leads the cast as the ship’s Cambridge-educated man of reason. Irish actor Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) plays the seasoned, ready-to-retire captain; David Dastmalchian is his dependable first mate. Aisling Franciosi (also Game of Thrones) plays a Romanian girl already very familiar with the “thing” now threatening everyone onboard. Dracula is portrayed by Javier Botet, a Spanish actor who’s apparently found his niche playing creatures in horror films and creature features, including Slender Man, Crimson Peak, and Conjuring and Insidious flicks.   

If you’re not a Dracula buff, in general, you might not want to board this salty slog of a rampaging monster romp. But fans of the character, grown from seeds planted 120 years ago, might find it an interesting addition to the ever-expanding movie canon of the undead’s OG.

It’s a scarifying creature feature that gets grimmer, gorier, bloodier and more violent as it sails along, with the body count rising and the crew winnowed down, one by one, to a handful of desperate survivors who must make a fateful decision. (And you might have thought your Carnival Cruise went badly.) It’s basically a little B-movie about the big D, perhaps the most dependably deplorable monster in monster lore. Dracula keeps coming back, and you can never count out the count.

And as this ill-fated sea cruise reminds us, there’s still plenty of life left in this ol’ bat.

—Neil Pond

Disney’s haunted-house redo is haunted by movie ghosts of another park attraction

Haunted Mansion
Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson & Tiffany Haddish
Directed by Justin Simien
PG-13

In theaters Friday, July 28

You’ve heard that old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.”

Disney’s initial attempt at turning its iconic haunted-house attraction into a movie, back in 2003, was a flop, especially with critics. Now the House of Mouse is trying, trying again, with a fresh take and a new cast.

But not new enough or fresh enough.

The new Haunted Mansion may delight some Disney fans, with its “ghostly” FX that dutifully replicates many of the giggly goosebumps of the actual Disney attraction. There are rooms that “stretch,” goofy-ghoul portraits, a ballroom of waltzing spirits, a cemetery a-swirl with specters, an ominous suit of armor, and the Hatbox Ghost, a fan-favorite cadaver from the ride. (Look him up Disney.fandom.com. He’s got quite a story.)

But this movie lives in kind of cinematic netherworld, too goofy to be truly scary and too ridiculously, rampantly cheesy to be truly funny, or fun. It’s good for a few chuckles (thanks mostly to the script, by Parks and Rec ace writer Katie Leopold, which gives Tiffany Haddish some nice nuggets). But most of the humor is forced, flat, rote and predictable, mired in a gooey, sentimental subplot that feels completely at odds with the sense of untethered, otherworldly escapism on which it’s so clearly, obviously based.

The cast is game and leans heavily into the hammy premise of how they all came to be together in a creaky old house awash in pesky paranormal activity on the outskirts of New Orleans. LaKeith Stanfield is a man of science grieving his late wife; Owen Wilson plays a priest; Tiffany Haddish is a local psychic with great Yelp reviews; Danny DeVito chews the scenery as an eccentric historian steeped in supernatural lore.  Rosario Dawson is a young-professional mom with a preteen son (newcomer Chase W. Dillon, who seems to be channeling the late child actor Gary Coleman from Diff’rent Strokes).

The characters find out that, if they try to leave the mansion, the pesky ghosts will follow them home, or wherever they go. Disney buffs will recall that’s just what visitors to the attraction are warned will happen as they exit the ride.  

The house is haunted by a pantheon of out-of-control spirits, including a ghost medium (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Jared Leto brings the Hatbox Ghost back from the crypt.

Acclaimed movie maestro Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth, Nightmare Alley) initially wanted to make this movie, or at least write its screenplay. But shakeups at Disney shook him out of the project and ushered in Justin Simien, whose previous experience includes the TV series Dear White People and the satirical horror comedy Bad Hair. With del Toro at the helm, Haunted Mansion would have certainly been a different movie—and likely a much better one.

The overstuffed, hyper comedic mayhem gets even more overcrowded with familiar-face cameos from Dan Levy and Winona Rider (as tour guides), and Marilu Henner as a tourist. Time your movie bathroom break wrong and you’ll miss ‘em. Rider’s teeny role is likely a nod to another haunted-house movie, Beetlejuice, in which she starred in 2008, when she was 17.

But this Haunted Mansion is no Beetlejuice. Heck, it’s not even its predecessor, the previous Haunted Mansion (actually, The Haunted Mansion), which at least had the manic movie-star mojo of Eddie Murphy. And it’s no Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney’s 2003 live-action version of another of its popular park attractions, which went on to be a global box-office blockbuster of a franchise. This is another misfire, another Disney dud that feels like an under-performer, despite the work and intentions that went into it.  

A houseful of ghosts, once again, turns out to be no match for boatloads of buccaneers.

—Neil Pond

The brainy blockbuster ‘Oppenheimer’ is a big, beautiful must-see about the man who made the device that ended World War II—and created the grim specter of global destruction

Oppenheimer
Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon & Robert Downey Jr.
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Rated R

In theaters Friday, July 21

It opens with a screen that tells us about Prometheus, the Greek god who “stole fire from the gods and gave it to men.” His fellow Olympians weren’t too happy with him, and they sentenced Prometheus to spend eternity in torment, shackled to a volcano.

Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus, about Robert J. Oppenheimer, the New York-born theoretical physicist who led America’s Manhattan Project, the top-secret “think tank” that created the atomic bombs dropped in on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan in August 1945. The bombs effectively ended World War II, but also created the grim specter of nuclear war as a reality, one that could—theoretically—lead to the destruction and doom of the entire planet.

Director Christopher Nolan’s grandiose, magnum opus of a historical biopic depicts Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as a tortured, sometimes arrogant genius, wrestling with the wide-reaching global implications of what he’s doing, and later, with what he’s done. Like Prometheus, he harnessed the fire of the cosmos—splitting subatomic particles and unleashing the deadly “fire” power of a thermonuclear device—and was then pilloried for it, with accusations that he was a traitor, a spy, a Commie.

It’s a dense drama, powerful and potent, about a loaded moment in time at the intersection of politics, science, discovery, history, human emotion, psychodrama, creation and destruction, chain reactions and ethics, all swirling like protons and neutrons around something no one had ever done, or witnessed, before. It’s a cinch for year-end awards nominations, likely even some Oscars. Yes, it’s that good.

Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon

The all-star cast is outstanding, with everyone playing someone from real life, from Matt Damon as the hawkish Leslie Groves, the U.S. Air Force general who built the Pentagon and was chosen to oversee Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife—whose former ties to the Communist Party become a major, troublesome part of her husband’s trajectory from the classroom to the world stage.  Robert Downey Jr. is a major part of the story as Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission. There’s Florence Pugh, Oppy’s Communist lover, and Casey Affleck as the military intelligence officer who commands the Allied forces during the war.  Matthew Modine plays a scientist doing high-ranking R&D for America’s war machine. Kenneth Branagh is the Danish physicist Niels Bhor, and Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein.

But everything hinges on Oppenheimer, the central character in almost every scene. Murphy, an Irish actor who’s also appeared in Batman Begins and Inception, plus the British hit TV series Peaky Blinders, gives a stunning, career-high performance, conveying the inner turmoil, passionate convictions and strong opinions of the man tasked with making a device that would weaponize the science on which he had dedicated his life. Oppenheimer’s bombs ended the fighting and brought peace to a war that had been raging across the globe for six years. But what would be the cost to him, and to the world?

Director Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay and produced) is perhaps Hollywood’s leading movie maestro, known for his densely layered, often complex dramas and intense character studies across multiple genres, including a trio of acclaimed Batman blockbusters starring Christian Bale, the mind-bending Inception, Tenet and Memento, the gripping, innovative war drama Dunkirk, and the far-out space-travel drama Interstellar. He knows better than almost anyone how to make blockbusters with brains, and Oppenheimer is queued up to be one of the most intensely brainy, monumentally majestic, stylistically soaring blockbusters of the year.

And the “test” of Oppenheimer’s nuclear device, at Los Alamos in the American desert, is as gripping, jaw-droppingly dramatic and visually stunning as almost anything you’ve ever experienced at any movie, ever.

With booming, atmospheric sound design, lavish visuals, probing questions about the role of science in the world, and a dive into the mysteries of the universe and our place in it, Oppenheimer enters the race as one of the year’s most impressive, important films. I won’t even take away any points for its nearly three-hour running time. It takes a big movie to tell about history’s biggest bang. And Oppenheimer is big, beautiful and absolutely a must-see.  

—Neil Pond