Renfield (2023)

Directed by Chris McKay. Starring Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Nicolas Cage, Ben Schwartz, Shoreh Aghdashloo, Brandon Scott Jones, Camille Chen, Adrian Martinez, James Moses Black. [R]

In present day New Orleans, Count Dracula’s familiar, Renfield (Hoult), is tired of answering to his master’s demands, and seeks to break his codependency with the support of a self-help group and an alliance with one of the district’s few incorruptible police officers (Awkwafina). A jokey, over-the-top action-horror hybrid heavy on the CGI-assisted gore and the self-conscious stabs at cleverness. It doesn’t work, to be sure—the lazy fallbacks, the forced believe-in-yourself message inserts, the phony sense of the meta—but it’s the kind of stumble you shrug at rather than hoot derisively, and Cage has some amusingly theatrical moments as Drac. What passes for plot points here are so uninteresting, it left me with time to wonder just what the heck is going on here: at the beginning, we see Hoult and Cage in recreations of the Renfield/Dracula roles in select scenes from Tod Browning’s Universal horror classic, which sets this movie up as taking place in that same fictional universe…but Bram Stoker’s novel exists in this world, and everyone around the master/familiar has heard of Dracula yet is skeptical he really exists? Onscreen vampire-slayer William Ragsdale (from Fright Night) appears briefly as a doomed priest, but I’m not sure if it counts as an in-joke or not.

48/100