The Last Voyage of the Demeter: from the Captain’s Log

People forget Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, probably because most film versions cannot replicate its use of letters and journals to tell its classic tale. One of the scariest sections of the book was the “Captain’s Log” of the Demeter, the ship contracted to transport Dracula’s coffins to London. Focusing on those often glossed-over passages is good idea for a fresh take on the legendary vampire, but the results are somewhat mixed in Andre Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which opens nationwide tomorrow.

Obviously, this voyage will end badly, especially for Captain Elliot. It is too bad, since he just announced his retirement. Their journey starts promisingly, except for the local Bulgarian seamen, who freaks out at the sight of their Dragon-stenciled cargo. He will be replaced by Clemens, a trained doctor eager to return home after knocking around the Balkans.

Clemens gets on famously with the Captain’s grandson Toby (whose life he saved) and mostly passably with the rest of the crew. However, tensions start to rise when their livestock is mysteriously slaughtered. Clemens comes into more direct conflict with cruder, more superstitious crew members, when he insists on nursing an emaciated stowaway back to health, after they discover her buried half-dead in their strange dirt-filled crates. Obviously, she was supposed to be food for the vampire now hunting the Demeter crew.

The Dracula of Øvredal’s Demeter deliberately resembles Max Schreck in Murnau’s Nosferatu, which is a shrewd aesthetic choice for a film partially conceived as Alien on a 19^th Century sailing ship. The vampire makeup applied to Javier Botet is appropriately monstrous and creepy. A distinguished looking gent in a cape just wouldn’t work in this context.

Frankly, the best part of Demeter is the gothic look of its period production. The design team (including production designer Edward Thomas and art director Marc Bitz) create a richly detailed shipboard environment, showing us all the narrow passageways and rat-infested chambers of the Demeter. The ship is cool, in a dank, uninviting kind of way.

Unfortunately, screenwriters Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewitz depart from established lore in distractingly annoying ways. No longer does the sight of the cross hold any power over Dracula. This does indeed seem to reflect an ugly anti-Christian bias, considering Joseph the abrasively Catholic Filipino cook, is the first rat to abandon the ship—and the audience is not expected to feel sympathy for him, when he gets his gory comeuppance.

Holiday Gift Guide: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Alvin Schwartz made R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike possible. Although they far eclipsed him in terms of fame and merchandising, he was the favorite gateway drug of choice for a generation of young adult horror readers. His three short story anthologies (largely inspired by folklore and urban legends) continue to post strong backlist sales, thanks in good measure to Stephen Gammell’s now iconic illustrations. Thirty-eight years after the initial publication of the first book, several of Schwartz’s tales have been cleverly adapted in Andre Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, co-produced and co-adapted by Guillermo del Toro, which is now available on DVD for all your holiday shopping needs.

It is Halloween 1968 in rural Mill Valley, PA. Richard Nixon is poised to win his first presidential term, so things aren’t all bad. Stella Nicholls and her fellow horror fan high school pals have prepared a satisfyingly effective counter attack for when bullying Tommy Millner inevitably comes looking for them. Fleeing from the number-two-smelling jock, they take refuge in the car of Ramon Morales, a teenaged migrant farm worker “following the harvest.” He and Nicholls are both rather shy, but they still have instant chemistry.

Since it is Halloween, Morales drives them to the local haunted house, once owned by the proud Bellows family. According to legend, young Sarah Bellows, the “different” daughter, was kept locked in a secret room by her cruel parents, without any human company. Nevertheless, people would sneak into the house to hear her tell her scary stories. Of course, bad things were said to happen to her listeners afterward, especially when she continued the practice as a ghost. Unfortunately, the tall tale turns out to be true.

Devoted fans of the original anthologies might take issue with the approach taken by Øvredal, del Toro, and screenwriters Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, because it elevates the framing device to the primary narrative, instead presenting Schwartz’s stories as Sarah Bellows’ tales, which unfold is real life, tormenting her victims, as they magically appear in her journal. However, for viewers not invested in the Schwartz trilogy, it is a shrewd way to shape the material and build towards a legitimate climax.

Arguably, this concept maybe wouldn’t have played out as well without the screen charisma of Zoe Colletti and Michael Garza, playing Nicholls and Morales. They are refreshingly earnest and their chemistry is based on the degree to which they identify with each other, rather than sexuality. Colletti has some surprisingly poignant moments with Dean Norris, memorably playing her single (abandoned) father Roy. Frankly, there should have been more of them together.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe: Forensics Get Macabre

The tradition of using “John” and “Jane Doe” as anonymous monikers dates back to late Fourteenth Century English estate law. Typically, “Does” are either identified or forgotten, but the one that lands on the slab at the Tilden family-run mortuary and morgue is about to get Medieval on her examiners. The father and son are in for a frightful night when they start incising her body in André Øvredal’s aptly titled The Autopsy of Jane Doe (trailer here)—a Wednesday opener in New York, just in time for Christmas.

Upstairs, a seemingly normal family has fallen victim to an apparent triple homicide. In the basement, an otherwise pristine naked corpse lies half buried, with no obvious cause of death. The sheriff wants answers, so he asks crusty old Tommy Tilden to put a rush on the mysterious woman’s autopsy. To help meet the deadline, his lab technician son Austin will postpone a hot date with his girlfriend Emma.  In retrospect, that will definitely be a mistake.

As the Tildens start cutting into the Jane Doe, their findings only raise more questions. Her wrists and ankles were savagely broken and her organs were singed, but there are no outward signs of trauma. Around the time they start finding foreign objects in the mystery corpse, things start going bump in the night at the Tilden morgue.

Presumably, Autopsy was a simpler, more intimate production shoot than Øvredal’s Troll Hunter and perhaps even his dystopian short film The Tunnel, but it is devilishly clever “chamber” horror film. Just the concept of taking the terror to the morgue (presumably where most horror movie victims wind up) is a subversive twist. It is also rather amusingly ironic (in the right way) to see the original Hannibal Lecter, Brian Cox, playing a perfectly sane coroner. Frankly, the mounting unease of the first half is probably better than the supernatural woo-woo-ing of the concluding balance, but overall, it is a pretty nifty dark-and-stormy-night movie.

Cox might not sound like a Virginia country coroner, but it hardly matters. The sort of piercing intelligence he projects on-screen is more important. He also forges some appealingly comfortable chemistry with Emile Hirsch (as Austin). We immediately pick up on their years of shared family history and the sort of shorthand they developed from years of working together. They also look believable puttering about the autopsy lab. In unconventional support, Olwen Catherine Kelly is chillingly believable as the unblemished Jane Doe, thanks to extensive yoga and meditation training. Maybe she should tackle Beckett’s Not I next.

A lot of nice production design work went into the Tilden Morgue. However, the lighting sometime is too dark to properly show it off (at least via the medium in which we saw it). Regardless, Autopsy is a creepy film, with genuinely memorable, multidimensional co-leads, which is saying something for the genre. Highly recommended for horror fans, The Autopsy of Jane Doe opens Wednesday (12/21) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Tribeca ’16: Warped Speed shorts

To this day, Esquire associate editor Alice Glaser might be the greatest one-hit wonder in science fiction. Her short story “The Tunnel” has been steadily anthologized since it was first published in 1961, but there were no follow-ups. Nearly sixty-five years after its initial pub, it has inspired the best science fiction film adaptation at this year’s Tribeca, most definitely including High-Rise. It screens as part of the Warped Speed block of sf short films programmed in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

André Øvredal’s The Tunnel (trailer here) shows us a future population control advocates could really get behind. After spending a lovely day at the beach, Peter’s family are driving back into Manhattan. Although they keep up appearances for the sake of his little sister, he is grown-up enough to understand how anxious they are about driving through the titular tunnel. Perhaps Logan’s Run fans might hazard a guess as to why. The randomness is supposed to be what makes it fair, but what we will see transpire is anything but.

Tunnel is a tight, emotionally heavy film that looks as good as any dystopian feature film. In terms of tone, it is lightyears removed from Øvredal’s prior feature, Troll Hunter, but it is just as technically adept. While it only runs twelve minutes including credits, Max Amundsen still makes quite an impression as the suddenly mature-beyond-his-years Peter.

Tim Egan’s Curve is also vaguely dystopian but more sketch-like in narrative terms. A young woman comes to, finding herself precariously balanced on the concave ledge of a futuristic aqueduct or who knows what. Egan’s visual backdrop is striking, but watching struggle in such a probably hopeless position is not exactly fun.

The other head-and-shoulders highlight of Warped Speed would have to be Romain Quirot’s The Last Journey of the Enigmatic Paul WR (trailer here). As the Red Moon hurtles towards Earth, only Paul WR’s one-man suicide mission can save the planet. However, he has driven off into the desert to wrestle with his doubts. That is about the only place he can think in peace, because Paul WR is cursed to hear the thoughts of every human in his general proximity. Even feature-length science fiction films often rely on one gimmick, but Enigmatic has a heck of a lot going on. Quirot also maintains a distinctively fatalistic vibe throughout.

The remaining three films largely deal with relationships through a speculative lens. As the shtickiest, Ben Rock’s Future Girlfriend is the least of the program. Mark Slutsky’s Never Happened is amusing but better suited as a piece for a sketch comedy show.

By far, the most substantial of the closing trio is Coralie Fargeat’s Reality+. Sad sack security guard Vincent Dangeville becomes the latest customer of the Reality+ chip. Once installed, the user and all other chip users see an idealized version of himself. Now he can party with the beautiful people, but only while its twelve-hour charge last. Of course, some of those beautiful people are probably also reaping the benefits of the chip. Fargeat’s ideas are quite well developed, but it is rather baffling that she seems to think Aurélia Poirier looks like a plain Jane neighbor. Still, Poirier manages to carry it off through acting, body language, and what-have-you.

Despite the thematic consistency (that could have been more consistent), Warped Speed is a typically uneven short film block. Still, The Tunnel, The Last Journey of the Enigmatic Paul WR, and Reality+ give viewers a solid fifty percent (or sixty-two percent if you calculate total minutes). Recommended on balance for fans of genre shorts, the Warped Speed program screens again this afternoon (4/22) and tomorrow (4/23) as part of the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.