Renfield: Dracula's Delivery Boy Stands Up For Himself, Much Gore and Some Laughs Ensue
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
The poster for the “Dracula comedy” Renfield both communicates and miscommunicates the gory and fitfully funny cheese-corn movie it promotes.
Hovering above everything is Nicolas Cage, looking sinister and controlling, everything we want Dracula to be and would expect Nicolas Cage to deliver. Below him is Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road), looking, well, worried and inwardly torn.
Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and Renfield (Nicholas Hoult). And you thought your boss was a monster.
The first is spot on. Cage, who went more psychologically vampiric in 1988’s audacious Vampire’s Kiss, plays Vlad Drakul with gusto, paying tribute to various earlier incarnations, evoking Bela Lugosi (in black-and-white in the film’s opening), Christopher Lee and even – with his sawed-off sharp teeth – Lon Chaney’s vampire in the lost London After Midnight.
But though Cage gets top billing (and some of the best lines and best “kills”), Dracula is a second banana in the film. Hoult’s Renfield is the protagonist, introduced as an attendee but non-participant in an aphorism-heavy support group for people trying to escape toxic, co-dependent relationships.
It’s a good set-up. The Renfield here is a character mash-up of Renfield in Bram Stoker’s novel and Jonathan Harker (whose downfall begins with the assignment of working as the real estate agent for the sale of Dracula’s castle).
He has remained for generations as a “familiar,” not part of the Undead himself, but given some of Dracula’s powers upon eating an insect (a Vampire’s Kiss reference, the effect is something like spinach for Popeye or cocaine for Cocaine Bear).
Their relationship is sarcastic, partly because they’re laying low in New Orleans, with Drac recovering from excessive sunburn and Renfield guiltily helping him recuperate with fresh blood.
If this set-up were in the hands, say, Taika Waititi, you’d have a spin-off of What We Do in the Shadows.
But this is the work of Chris McKay (The LEGO Batman Movie, Robot Chicken), so you know this is a movie that is going to revel in self-awareness and quick editing. The quips fly and the humour can be subtle (no Welcome Mat ever got as big a laugh) or the full-out shock laughs of an exploding head.
A tacked-on plot and severed limbs fills the screen-time. Renfield crosses paths with a mob family the Lobos, run by Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her inept son Teddy (Ben Schwartz), who run the city and have much of the New Orleans police on their payroll
Not on the payroll is Rebecca (Awkwafina), the tough, loose-cannon cop who becomes essentially Renfield’s only friend, and eventual partner against crime and vampirism.
If Renfield were a serious movie, all the gory fight and slaughter scenes would seem overindulgent. But judging from the audience laugh-meter at the screening I attended, the right decisions were made for the material.
As for Cage’s Count Dracula, there’s yet more fodder here for those “Nicolas Cage loses his shit onscreen” montages on YouTube.
Renfield. Directed by Chris McKay. Starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage and Awkwafina. In theatres Friday, April 14.