Renfield - Review Thread

Probably Hotel Transylvania, if you want to count that.

Renfield(4/18/2023)
After the “Dark Universe” fell apart Universal decided they were going to take a less… cynical… approach to monetizing their “monsters” asset and would make individual disconnected movies aimed at adults and relevant to the modern world out of these characters. Sounds like the right approach and their first effort in this venture, the Blumhouse co-produced 2020 version of The Invisible Man, was a pretty good example of how this could work. That movie was pretty serious minded but for their next attempt they seem to have gone in the other direction and made a rather splattery comedy from the perspective of a deep-cut character from Dracula named Renfield. Pretty much the second I saw the movie’s trailer I was pretty sure it would divide people: mass audiences would be alienated and stay away but that the movie was also likely to find something of a cult following that would dig it. On some level that seems to have happened and yet I also suspect that the advertising might have been a little too honest and what would have been an unexpected surprise has turned out to be a rather expected one. The film follows Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), a familiar for Dracula (Nicholas Cage) who’s been tasked with finding victims for his master in modern day New Orleans and is beginning to have a crisis of conscience about this. There’s definitely some clever stuff to be found here like a prologue that re-enacts some of the famous sequences from the 1931 Dracula and I quite enjoyed Akwafina as a city police officer trying to take down a brutal gang that eventually becomes involved in Dracula’s plan for world conquest. However there are other elements of the film that kind of feel like they were a bit out of date. Some of the film’s gory but comical violence might have come as more of a shock five to then years ago but such imagery is starting to feel commonplace in movies like this. I also think we’re getting a little done with Nicholas Cage’s shtick at this point, especially in movies like this which seem to be tailored around his over the top wackiness. Cage is better when it feels like his wilder instincts are kind of invading an otherwise unsuspecting movie, but movies like this where everything else seems to be just as over the top as him kind of just feel desperate. But I don’t want to be too negative here as I do think this has more going for it than the average Hollywood release and there is fun to be had with it, but it doesn’t live up to its full potential either.
*** out of Five