This starry vampire caper borrows from the best bits of Hollywood monster movies and features some truly resplendent gore, but its tone and its morals are a bit off
he 1988 movie Vampire’s Kiss, about a lonely lothario with delusions of vampirism, might have flopped at the box office, but it did help to establish Nicolas Cage’s idiosyncratic performance style. Inevitably, he’s now brought his eye-popping instincts and shouty charisma to the role of Count Dracula – with most pleasing results.
Cage’s Dracula doesn’t have top billing here, however; that goes to his longtime servant, played as a meek-but-mighty Englishman by. In this telling, Renfield’s bug-eating is the source of his super-strength, not a mark of madness, and he wants out of what he sees as an abusive relationship with his over-demanding boss. But breaking free is complicated by a blossoming romance with Rebecca Quincy , a New Orleans cop determined to bring a local crime family to justice.
In this way, Renfield efficiently sucks only the best and bloodiest lore from decades of Hollywood monster movies. A black-and-white preamble, in the stye of Bela Lugosi’s 1930s heyday, nicely sets up the master-servant relationship, while the whole “lifeforce-draining monster” metaphor is comically reinvented for Renfield’s therapy support group for victims of narcissistic personalities.
As you’d expect from a movie originated by Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead zombie franchise, Renfield is also resplendent in gore. Dracula’s grotesque visage – decaying in reverse as he gathers strength – is a prosthetics triumph, and in one fight scene our hero rips an opponent’s arms from his torso, then uses the severed limbs as clubs to batter his next victim. Cool!
This may be all good clean comedy-horror fun, but more unintentionally stomach-turning is Renfield’s carefree depiction of gun violence, in a period when real-life US shooting deaths are soaring. Gun massacres are fine here, but snogging? Not so much. In fact, Renfield is so coy that romantic leads Awkwafina and Hoult barely even hold hands.
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