BEFORE: Man, I'm so glad I got ahead in the count when I could, because it's a new week and I'm working four out of five weekdays at the theater, which is hosting NewFest. It's all hands on deck and I had requested time off to work at NY Comic-Con, so instead they booked me solid in the days before AND after Comic-Con. I was so booked that then I did NOT even go to NYCC, instead I took a three day break to rest up, which was a smart idea. This week could wear me down, but then I've got a week off and we're driving to see my parents in N. Carolina, so my blog will be dark. I'll still make it to 25 horror movies, but I calculated that I would need a head start, so I watched three movies in advance (one was "Fantastic Four: First Steps", obviously, which turned out to be very smart because it's no longer in theaters, and not yet on streaming. Sometimes I do seem to know what I'm doing.)
Nicholas Hoult carries over from "Nosferatu".
THE PLOT: Renfield, Dracula's tortured henchman, is forced to capture prey for his master and do his bidding. But now, after centuries of servitude, Renfield is ready to see if there is a life outside his boss's shadow.
AFTER: We've reached the vampire portion of the horror chain, there will be one more vampire-based film this week, see if you can guess which one it will be. HINT: It's not "Daybreakers", although that would have been a good choice to link to from "Nosferatu". And it's not "From Dusk Till Dawn 2" or "The Last Voyage of the Demeter". Eh, you'll know it in a couple of days.
This vampire double-feature kind of turned out opposite from how I thought it would go down, "Nosferatu" seemed like it was going to be a disturbing, dark film but it's so over-the-top solemn that it looped around to silly again. Tonight's film seemed much more comic, but had a better narrative and one that threw in a lot of action, so in addition to madcap fun it was quite exciting, or at least by comparison to yesterday's movie.
Renfield here becomes a self-aware familiar, he goes to group therapy and realizes that he's been Dracula's doormat for hundreds of years now, and he vows to change. Dracula is portrayed not just as a Prince of Evil, but also essentially a very toxic boss, he demands that Renfield attends to his every needs but offers him little in return except for all the insects he can eat. There's no bonuses for bringing him multiple fresh corpses, no OT if he works more than 40 hours a week, no retirement plan, no health insurance, and he's always pulling the power moves and belittling Renfield's efforts, constantly pointing out that Renfield would be nobody and nowhere without him. Jeez, I think maybe we've all had a boss like that, especially if you've worked in the art or filmmaking field. I nearly got PTSD flashbacks from watching Renfield re-assess his career in the vampire service industry.
Once he realizes the relationship is toxic, how does he get out of it? Is there any life for him outside of being a familiar, can he even have a different career, or, worst case scenario, perhaps the vampire's powers have kept him alive for too long, and perhaps he'll die without this job. Or, you know, probably it just feels that way, I can confirm this. Renfield, I feel you, your boss is NEVER going to change, he's not just been drinking the blood from his victims, he's been draining your soul and your self-worth at the same time. Get out of there, even if you have to go find a menial job in a movie theater or walk dogs for a living, anything is better than the job you have now.
Dracula's been on a long journey around the world, with Renfield moving his coffin from city to city, and since the latest stop is New Orleans, that means that the city is full of drug dealing gangs, and also plenty of corrupt cops. There's like ONE female cop who's still honest, and she's got a vendetta against the drug gangs because they killed her father, who was also a cop. Say, you don't suppose she's going to team up with a vampire's familiar who has lost his way and looking for an army of criminals that both deserves to die and also could provide fresh blood for his master, do you? There's both comedy and potential romance in their team-up, but they've got their work cut out for them if, say, Dracula should happen to team up with the drug gangs. It seems like an odd pairing because with his appetite for blood, Dracula seems more a like an addicted drug user than a supplier. Just a thought.
I have to mention how over-the-top Nicolas Cage is as Dracula - that seems like a bit of casting that couldn't possibly work, only he starts acting like the big, over-dramatic, over-emoting Nic Cage that not every director lets him be, and it starts to work, for a time, anyway. But he keeps going and takes it way too far, and then you're constantly reminded that this is Nicolas Cage, and there are no small roles for him, and he's maybe too big to play Dracula, even if you let Dracula off the chain and let him go wild. Maybe you'll find it funny, but Dracula isn't supposed to be funny, we learned that in "Love at First Bite" and "Dracula: Dead and Loving It", the character can't be both scary and funny, it's just not possible. There should have been a time where the director could be able to say, "Nic, baby honey sweetie, you're acting at like a Vampire 10, and we need you to dial it back to like a Vampire 8, OK?"
The original Renfield, in the "Dracula" novel, was an inmate in an asylum, who suffered from delusions that compelled him to eat small living creatures to obtain their life-force. He said that Dracula sent him the insects, then he got the idea to feed those flies to spiders, the spiders got fed to birds, and then he would eat the live birds and gain all of that essence. Renfield then attempts to escape from the asylum to meet up with his master, finally Dracula approaches him with a deal, if Renfield worships him, he would make him immortal by providing him with all the insects he can eat. And also, he'd get every other Sunday off, but NO two-week vacation, because that's too long for Dracula to go without a victim.
In the classic 1931 "Dracula" film, Renfield is the real-estate agent who goes to Transylvania to meet with the Count and sell him property in England (Jonathan Harker's role in the novel) and then he falls under Dracula's power and into his service. Because I guess if you're immortal you don't really need a retirement plan, do you? This film maintains the back-story created for that 1931 Bela Lugosi film, Renfield gave up his career in real-estate (and his wife and kids, apparently) to serve the Dark Lord indefinitely. Tell me there are fringe benefits beside the insects, or else this job does NOT make sense.
Fortunately, all the years as Dracula's familiar mean that Renfield knows all the ways that vampire hunters over the years have TRIED to kill Dracula, and so he knows what might work and also what definitely would not. Sure, you can try to pull the old "behind the curtain is THE SUN" trick, but many others have tried that before, he should be aware of it, you're just not going to surprise him with that. Anyway the sunlight here would only weaken him, not kill him. Renfield gets the idea to try the second oldest trick, the magical circle of containment, but then once you've got him trapped, what can you do? The classic is the old stake through the heart, but for some reason that's not an option here. What they do instead takes a lot longer and basically pulverizes him, but even then there's a chance he could come back from it. Meanwhile his blood is magical enough to restore a lot of the damage he's done in New Orleans, somehow. But I'm not sure there should be such a happy ending here, I mean it seems pretty far-fetched after everything we've been through up to that point. Also, how exactly did all that WORK?
Directed by Chris McKay (director of "The Tomorrow War")
Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Biggest Heist Ever"), Ben Schwartz (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Shohreh Aghdashloo (last heard in "Damsel"), Brandon Scott Jones (last seen in "Senior Year"), Adrian Martinez (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Camille Chen (last seen in "Yesterday"), Bess Rous (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Jenna Kanell (last seen in "Bad Boys: Ride or Die"), Danya LaBelle (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Rhonda Johnson Dents (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), Susan McPhail (ditto), Christopher Matthew Cook (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F"), Michael P. Sullivan (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Rosha Washington (last seen in "Carry-On"), Sarah Durn (ditto), James Moses Black (last seen in "Queenpins"), T.C. Matherne (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Caroline Williams (last seen in "Days of Thunder"), Marcus Lewis, Derek Russo (also last seen in "Bad Boys: Ride or Die"), Marvin Ross, Gabriel Rodriguez (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Dave Davis (last seen in "Stolen"), Keith Brooks (last seen in "Strays"), Joshua Mikel (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Chloe Adona, Stephen Louis Grush (last seen in "Unhinged"), Lucy Faust (ditto), Christopher Winchester (last seen in "The Burial"), John Cihangir (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Brian Egland, Christopher Clarke, Lena Clark, Brianna Quinn Lewis (last seen in "Blue Beetle"), Lacey Dover, Stefany Almendinger, Krystal Tomlin, Camden McKinnon, William Ragsdale (last seen in "Knock at the Cabin"), Miles Doleac (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Mike Harkins (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Betsy Borrego (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Anil Bajaj, with archive footage of Helen Chandler, Edward Van Sloan (last seen in "Dracula's Daughter".
RATING: 6 out of 10 rags soaked with chloroform
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