Bone Voyage

For the first horror movie of spook season, we picked The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). It's based on the voyage that Dracula took to England. SPOILER - Everyone on the ship dies. 

It starts with a set of coffins boxes being loaded on the Demeter in some Eastern port. The quartermaster Wojcek (Daniel Dastmalchian) hires a band of laborers for the voyage. An educated black man, Corey Hawkins, tries to get a place, but they pick a stronger looking man. However, when he sees the dragon labels on the boxes, he bails, and Hawkins gets to go onboard.

One of the boxes broke open in moving, and after they are underweigh, Hawkins goes to investigate. He finds a comatose girl, Aisling Franciosi, in a pile of dirt. He starts giving her transfusions to see if he can save her. Most of the crew is against the idea of a woman on board, but the captain won't put her off, if Hawkins takes repsonsibility.

He soon has her awake, and she tells them that there is a horrible monster aboard, and they all need to get out!

Soon, all hell breaks loose. The animals are all killed, then the ship's dog, then the captain's cute little son. Good riddance. Through all of this, Hawkins tries to find a scientific explanation. And if you think Franciosi can give them some advice in killing the monster, she says if they knew how to kill the monster, they would have killed it centuries ago. 

This is the part people call "Alien on a boat". We know there were no survivors - no live survivors, ecept the rats. So we watch people getting picked off one by one. Sadly, this is hard to watch, because they all die so dumb. For instance, they figure out that he needs to be in his coffin by day. Then they ignore that, even after seeing several of the bitten go up in flames in the sun. 

So, in spite of a good idea and best intentions, this wasn't thatgood. Partly the lack of tension - everyone dies - except the undead. Then, the stupidness. Maybe the monster could have been more effective, but it wasn't bad, and you got to see a lot of. We liked Hawkins, Franciosi, and Dastmalchian. I guess it's worth watching, in Spooktober, anyway.