Film review: Renfield, Dracula update stars Nicolas Cage

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If you’re turning out yet another incarnation of Dracula, the most filmed fictional character ever, common decency suggests some kind of novel angle.

This blood-drenched action/ horror/ comedy set in present-day New Orleans focuses on his familiar, Renfield (Hoult) and explores his master/slave relationship with the dark lord, (Cage, obviously) through the contemporary prism of toxic codependency.

Renfield attends group therapy sessions trying to talk through his inability to break free of his abusive partner. Or perhaps the novel angle is to make a film where Cage is the most stable and predictable element.Nicholas Hoult as Renfield (Image: Universal Studios)

Cage’s Dracula is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Taking inspiration primarily from Bela Lugosi, he's an old-fashioned bloodsucker, part cheesy charmer, part malevolent goblin. Cage hasn't been in a live-action major studio film for over a decade, so sensing this as something of a comeback he doesn’t push things too far and his line readings are comparatively straightforward.

Around him, the film spills out all over the place, hurtling through its 93 minutes in various different directions, trying to fill every moment with something to keep us diverted.Renfield (Image: Universal Studios)

It's funny, insanely violent, satirical, a sincere study of codependency, it’s a horror, and it’s a one good cop (Awakafina) versus the mob drama.

The film throws so much at the audience, it’d be churlish to deny it’s entertaining. But it is disposable. Plus, a pedant might argue that this Renfield, who was seduced by Dracula when he went to Europe to make a property deal, is actually more Jonathan Harker.

Directed by Chris Mckay. Starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwarz and Shohreh Aghdashloo. In cinemas. Running time: 93 mins.

Raging Bull is back in cinemas in a new Martin Scorsese-approved 4K restoration. Back in the eighties and nineties, this biopic of middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta was seen as Scorsese and De Niro’s masterpiece.

De Niro gaining 60 pounds to play him in retirement was the ultimate piece of method acting while Scorsese’s visual barrage of photographers’ flash bulbs, fast editing, judiciously applied slow motion, and zappy camera moves was filmmaking at an intensity that had rarely been seen before. Now 'though it all looks a bit overblown, a repetitive knockabout caricature of Italian American New York life.

Read the full review at www.half-man-half-critic.weebly.com along with a look at Arrow Video's 4K UHD Blu-ray release of Cronenberg's Naked Lunch and Curzon's 7-disc Three Colours boxset.