It’s hard to imagine a better actor today than Nicolas Cage for the role of Count Dracula in a film that is actually a comedy, a parody of a good number of those Count Dracula movies. And it’s a real shame that Cage’s Dracula is actually a secondary character, and that Chris McKay (Lego Movie, The Tomorrow War) made “Renfield” into an exaggerated, caricatured pulp action where blood literally flows in streams, and human limbs are crushed and they blow up like on a conveyor belt. The titular Renfiled (Nicholas Hoult) is actually Count Dracula’s assistant who is fed up with an unhealthy relationship with the master to whom he has devoted his entire life.
Unfortunately, after an excellent introduction in which, in the style of the Dracula movies with Bel Lugosi, we learn the background and history of the relationship between master and servant, everything goes to hell. It is neither classic horror, nor comedy, nor action, but a bizarre mix of all that, because it tries to partly follow the path of the successful comedy “What We Do in the Shadows”, which combines with the worst action, exploitation films, and Renfield is an action a hero on the trail of Chuck Norris. Just like Count Dracula, he also has special powers and strength that he gets after feeding on insects, and the story takes place in New Orleans where Renfield and Dracula took refuge after their last encounter with vampire killers.
While Dracula is trying to regain his power and strength, Renfield is trying to emancipate himself and he went to meetings of people who are in unhealthy relationships. This environment offers him a win-win situation, because while he tries to extricate himself from such a relationship with his bloodthirsty boss, he also finds victims for him along the way. However, by chance one of those victims will be criminals who stole drugs from a local criminal organization that controls the entire city. And that action-crime part is a parody, and it’s pulpy, almost in the footsteps of “The Mask” with Jim Carrey, seasoned with shocking, graphic violence almost at the level of cartoons, so it’s hard to describe “Renfield” as horror.
And Cage is really hilarious as he performs his neo-shamanic acting style in what is probably the silliest depiction of Count Dracula seen on film, a true caricature of that character who is now also an obsessive maniac who wants to rule the world. They will look for partners in this in the already mentioned criminal organization and its boss Lobo (Ben Schwartz), while Renfield and the police officer Rebecca (Awkwafina) will find themselves on the opposite side. It’s a film that plays on that deadpan humor that often doesn’t work, but it also works on bizarre situations in which everyone perceives what is obviously abnormal as something completely normal. I expected a different movie from “Renfield”, not this kind of bloody and brutal action, but it would be unfair to say that this antics wasn’t partly fun.