Stream It Or Skip It: 'Renfield' on VOD, a Disappointing Satire That ...

Going into Renfield (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), it’s pretty much a 100 percent money-back guarantee of an assumption that the best thing about it is gonna be Nicolas Cage playing Dracula. The film was originally going to be part of the Dark Universe movie series featuring updated riffs on classic Universal monsters, but it was shelved after 2017’s The Mummy flopped; the idea eventually was reanimated once The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman stepped in and pitched it as a standalone comedy. And then Cage, fresh off a career revitalizing role in Pig, was cast as the iconic vampire, prompting us to hope that the movie would try to do more than just coast on his inevitable gnashy-gnashy OTT scenery-eating performance – which we’re here to evaluate right now.

The Gist: The first scene doesn’t feature Nicolas Cage As Dracula. Please temper your disappointment. They’ve gotta have some kind of build-up and a reveal, right? Sure. And so we open with Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), parked amidst members of a support group for people stuck in abusive codependent relationships. He explains directly to us in voiceover how he’s Dracula’s familiar, which makes him Smithers to Dracula’s Mr. Burns, except in this case, Renfield gets a smidgen of his boss’ considerable powers, mostly manifesting as an ability to jump long and high and punch people so hard that their heads explode and chests cave in and blood splatters everywhere in big nasty gushy gushes. (There are many such scenes of ludicrous violence; brace yourselves.) You remember the Renfield and Dracula characters from the old movie with Bela Lugosi, right, so what we get is scratchy black-and-white, cropped-aspect-ratio reenactments of scenes from the 1931 film with Cage and Hoult. And here we learn that Dracula has to consume human life to maintain his powers of strength and flight and to transform into a smattering of bats, and Renfield must eat bugs to maintain his smidgen. “Make sense?” Renfield says, and yes, that’s a joke, for sense it does not make.

The life of Dracula and his loyal familiar finds them relocating to different cities from time to time, a byproduct of Renfield’s routine murdering of locals so his lord can sup their blood. Another byproduct is the psychological trauma of being an immortal servant to an immortal cannibalistic monster, especially one who sets his hook really deep by saying, I’m your only friend you worthless toady, you know, manipulative, controlling shit like that. It’s the present day, and they’re holed up in the basement of an abandoned New Orleans hospital, where Drac is convalescing from a really nasty sunburn, which has turned his skin into a drippy gloppy nasty disgustingness that makes the melted toxic-waste guy in RoboCop look like medium-rare filet mignon with a baked potato. And this is where the support group comes in; Renfield doesn’t attend the meetings for therapeutic reasons, but rather, to find abusers and kill them and feed them to Drac, because Renfield has determined that the world is theoretically better off without such subhumans: “He’s really into ska,” confesses one attendee of her abuser, thus confirming Renfield’s sound logic.

But. But: Renfield is beginning to realize his situation mirrors those in the support group. At this point, we’ve seen Nicolas Cage As Dracula a few times, and our desire to see more of Nicolas Cage As Dracula is waylaid by subplots involving a gangster scumlord named Tedward Lobo (Ben Schwartz) and his mob-boss mom Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who head the city’s most powerful organized-crime syndicate. Renfield’s murdery shenanigans entangle him with the Lobo family, and by turn, one of New Orleans’ few non-corrupt cops: Awkwafina, Good Lieutenant, Port of Call New Orleans. Awkwafina’s character is named Rebecca, and she befriends Renfield just as he’s trying to set up a life of his own outside Dracula’s shadow, although she doesn’t know that he’s a century-old deathless and murder-happy lickspittle to a very infamous supernatural dictator played by Nicolas Cage. And why would she? Renfield seems like a nice enough guy. She just hasn’t seen him eat bugs yet.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Renfield is essentially Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (which, of course you know, starred Cage as a baaaaaaaaaad cop who was so drugged out he hallucinated dead-eyed alligators) crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Let the Right One In – although it ultimately doesn’t come close to living up to the promise of that mashup.

Performance Worth Watching: Of course Nicolas Cage As Dracula draws our attention with eye-bulging bla-bla-bla Easter-bloc-accented goofballisms. That’s why you cast Nicolas Cage As Dracula. He’s fun to watch, and distracts from the fact that the script doesn’t give Awkwafina nearly enough funny things to say, which is a crime.

Memorable Dialogue: Rebecca eventually learns Renfield’s secrets:

Rebecca: You get Dracula people to eat?

Renfield: I do other stuff too.

Rebecca: Like what? Wash his cape?

Renfield: No. It’s dry-clean only.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: This screenplay – by Ryan Ridley, based on Kirkman’s story idea – has bats in its belfry. First off, you’ve got, all caps necessary, NICOLAS CAGE AS DRACULA, and he’s a supporting character to Hoult’s milquetoasty Renfield; if anyone could render Dracula as more than just a mythic creature, and a very funny more-than-just-a-mythic-creature, it’s Cage, but opportunities for him to play more than one note are slim, and it’s quite an amusing one-note performance, but a few hammy flourishes a character does not make. Then, the core idea of the fractured relationship between a narcissistic monster and his abused assistant is ripe for a neo-psychobabble satire with an earnest streak, but it’s frustratingly underdeveloped. And the movie leaves Awkwafina, a gifted comic actress, hung out to dry, grasping at the tattered fringe of a barely-there character. So you’ve got a strong cast, a rock-solid director (Chris McKay of The Lego Batman Movie and The Tomorrow War) and an inspired premise, and somewhere in this lumpy, misbegotten hodgepodge of forgettable nonsense is a funny, scary, dark, provocative film, but nobody bothered to actually write the goddamn thing. 

And then there’s the violence. This stapled-together nothing of a plot is frequently interrupted with nutty action sequences rife with disembowelments and exploding skulls and bursting clergymen, and therefore enough blood to turn the Suez Canal a deep shade of coagulated crimson. It’s ridiculous, and kind of fun, if tongue-in-cheek depravity tickles your cockles. Credit McKay for crafting an obnoxious cartoon reality with a weirdly upbeat tone, and occasionally indulging some dynamic visuals, from color schemes to wily camera movement. But the endeaver smacks of look-ma-we’re-going-off-the-rails!-ism, and again, the material fails him. It fails everyone. At the tail end of the movie, Awkwafina finally gets to deliver a whip-crack line: “Au revoir, biatch,” which is what we should say to Renfield, albeit insincerely, because once through this disappointing movie is enough.

Our Call: No one in their right mind would expect Nicolas Cage As Dracula to be a letdown, but here we are. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.