As the Nicolas Cage renaissance has continued, we’ve been blessed by some entertaining comedies and horror films starring the eccentric master of overacting. His signature style might be getting old for some people out there, but I am still on board with the idea of getting Nicolas Cage to go “full Cage” in every role he has because it still makes me laugh uncontrollably whenever it happens. So, when I saw the trailer for Renfield, and a fair amount of Cage-isms were already on display with him as Dracula, I was ready to dive in…as soon as the film came to streaming.

Pros

Nicolas Cage, as usual
Fight choreography is pretty good
Some of the absurdity of the gory moments add to the humor
Some of the humor: specifically the more subtle and nuanced jokes
Makeup effects
Only 90 minutes

Cons

Awkwafina and all the material that focuses on her
Dialogue and script that does not involve Nicolas Hoult or Nicolas Cage
Editing; gaps in scenes; continuity issues
Blood effects
A lot of the humor

Plot & Thoughts

Renfield (Nicolas Hoult) is the iconic servant of the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness, Dracula (Nicolas Cage). He’s been serving the vampire for a long time (longer than the movie actually says), and he’s started to question the nature of their relationship. Having spent some time at self-help groups that discuss toxic relationships, hunting and killing the toxic lovers of the participants to feed to his master, the lessons of the help group have begun to make their way into his mind. While hunting a few drug dealers, he becomes accidentally involved in an evil crime family’s business and crosses paths with the amazing, so amazing, stunning & brave, amazing police officer, Rebecca (Awkwafina). Did I mention she’s amazing? Because the movie sure does, multiple times—you could make a drinking game out of it.

Rebecca is trying to take down the evil crime family because of a personal vendetta, but she is hitting a lot of bureaucratic roadblocks along the way. That is, until Renfield calls her amazing and the two of them get more involved in stopping the crime lords together. Unfortunately for both of them, his relationship with Dracula complicates matters. Renfield wants to use the special “Dracula powers” afforded to him when he eats bugs to save people and become a hero, but his master has become more interested in ruling the world. Thus, horrific, violent hi-jinks ensue on all sides.

Renfield is a horror comedy that works on some levels and bombs on others. When Nicolas Cage is doing his thing, it’s entertaining as hell. You can tell he loves playing Dracula. Nicolas Hoult is also great as the titular character with his natural ability to pull you in with his charm and play something of a bumbling goof with a dangerous side to him. If the story was just about the two of them being fishes out of water, and adapting to a modern lifestyle while fending off vampire hunters, I think it would have worked beautifully for both the horror and the comedy. Alas, there’s the whole plot about the crime family and Rebecca’s backstory which forces us to engage with Awkwafina.

I didn’t mind Awkwafina in Jumanji: The Next Level, but that was the first time I recall seeing her or knowing who she was. As it turned out, I saw her whole range of acting talent in that movie, because her performance in Renfield is stiff and uninteresting. It doesn’t help that the movie is constantly doing its best to elevate her as this amazing woman who never misses a shot with her pistol while forcing her story down our throats. Renfield is a side character in his own movie and barely has a story arc in comparison to her. I guess it’s a good thing the movie told us she’s amazing because I would never have assumed so otherwise.

Do you know what else the movie tells us? Renfield should be around 70 or 80 years old. Despite using footage from the 1930s classic, Dracula, and digitally replacing the faces of Bela Legosi and Colin Clive with Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Hoult to suggest the time period in which their story originated (in the late 1800s or early 1900s), the filmmakers are apparently so bad at math they didn’t realize the error in the dialogue. They could have just fixed the line by saying he’s more than a century old. It’s a minor flub, but it’s an obvious one and the film is loaded with instances in which the script or the editing missed explaining something. For the various payoffs that occur in the later acts, some of the setup is absent. This is somewhat spoilery, but here are some example questions I have: Why is Renfield a more powerful familiar than others? Why bother making it seem like Rebecca would make the immoral choice when there is never an instance leading up to that specific moment to suggest otherwise? Why does Dracula burst into flames to the point of near death in the beginning but is then able to avoid doing so later?

As I was watching Renfield, the script and a majority of its humor had a style and tone that really rubbed me the wrong way. There were some decent little jokes in there, like the doormat that said “Welcome, come in” which allowed Dracula to enter a home without a spoken invitation. And the absurdity of both Nicolas Cage’s performance and the over-the-top gore made me chuckle, even if the CGI blood effects looked terrible. However, a lot of the jokes had this very TikTok style to them. A lot of it is fast, loud, obnoxious, and brief so it can move on to the next joke quickly before you have time to process everything. It might work in a short video, but in a movie, it reeked of surface-level humor. It didn’t help that much of the delivery of said jokes came flatly from Awkwafina. The only time I chuckled at something she said was when she yelled “Fuck you, Kyle!” but that’s because South Park did it better plenty of times before.

TL;DR

Renfield is a film that could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. If there wasn’t a convoluted plot surrounding the crime family and Awkwafina’s inspirational character (who is very amazing) forced into the script, it would have been far more entertaining with just Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Hoult. I laughed several times and really enjoyed some of the humor, but found the rest of it to be grating and shallow. At only 90 minutes long, you could do far worse, but you could do a lot better as well.

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