In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Dracula’s Lyft gets a 1-star review

polygon.com:

Let’s say you meet a guy named Dracula. Like, actually named Dracula. It would be weird, right? That name comes with more than 125 years of connotation, a century-plus of accumulated cultural knowledge leaving just about anyone who’s so much as grazed the Western literary canon hardwired to associate “Dracula” with “FUCKING VAMPIRE.”

This means any story about Dracula, like the 2023 movie The Last Voyage of the Demeter, has a huge cultural hurdle to clear. Dracula is so ingrained in the culture that virtually all vampire fiction is commenting on him in some way, and any story directly invoking the Big Undead Man himself has to immediately figure out how it’s going to escape or lean into the powerful gravitational pull of Bram Stoker’s novel. This isn’t the worst problem in the world; a clever storyteller can do a lot with such a wide base of cultural knowledge. The potential for dramatic irony here is frankly delicious. The Last Voyage of the Demeter, however, is not clever.

Directed by André Øvredal with a script credited to Bragi Schut Jr. and Bullet Train’s Zak Olkewicz, The Last Voyage of the Demeter loosely adapts the captain’s log entries from Stoker’s Dracula, a section of the 1897 novel that briefly details how the vampire made his way from his native Transylvania to England. The log entries are a good bit of epistolary horror — the equivalent of found footage, in literary form — about the captain and crew of the merchant vessel Demeter slowly realizing that something is very wrong on their ship. Dracula, hidden in a crate of earth being shipped as cargo, begins picking off the crew one by one until the Demeter is found wrecked on the rocky shores of Whitby, England.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter imagines what