Not even memes could keep The Last Voyage of the Demeter afloat at the box office, with Universal failing to learn its lesson about perpetually rebooting Dracula, leaving the studio no option but to watch it sink as the second fresh spin on the iconic vampire to bomb within the space of four months. All that effort, and Blood Vessel got there first four years earlier.
Sure, the title is a bit too punny to put across its true intentions, but breaking down the lo-fi Australian hidden gem to its very essence outlines the drastic similarities between the two. Essentially; it’s bloodsuckers on a boat. Not just one as was the case in Demeter, but many. A 73 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes underlines the gulf in quality, and it’s dropped anchor on streaming, too.
Per FlixPatrol, the period piece that finds the survivors of a torpedoed ship clambering onto safety above a Nazi ship at the end of World War II – only to discover that it’s eerily empty for a reason and the culprits happen to have fangs and an unquenchable thirst for blood – has emerged as one of the top-ranked titles on Prime Video’s worldwide watch-list.
There’s even a solitary survivor with experience dealing in the undead to hammer home the Demeter comparisons, a curious coincidence when you consider there was already an underrated and overlooked “Dracula… but on a boat” movie in existence long before the recent misfire was cast out into the vast oceans of box office disaster without a hope of making it to shore.