Just the Ticket #127: Renfield

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.

After revisiting some unflattering Nicolas Cage reviews in last week's Ticket Stubs, I thought I would give his Renfield performance a fair taste to see if it was bloody good...or if it sucked as badly as my vampire puns.

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In my research prior to writing this review, I confirmed a few things that I had suspected while watching Renfield. As a product of NBC/Universal, and featuring characters based on the "Universal Monsters" cinematic universe from the 30s and onward, it's quite obvious that Renfield was originally meant to be part of the twice-failed "Dark Universe" that began with Dracula: Untold and re-began with official branding and The Mummy. Even in its current, action-comedy form, Renfield feels like a character origin story that would have fit into a larger, but now thinly defined world. It even has that "Marvel humor" sensibility and several Marvel/MCU actors, including Nicholas Hoult (the young, not-Kelsey Grammer version of Beast from the X-Men films) as Renfield, Awkwafina (still playing the comic-relief best friend/pseudo-love interest with potential archery skills type from Shang-Chi), Shohreh Aghdashloo (the evil aunt from the Ms. Marvel series, and her name wraps in the Starring column on Wikipedia, so I thought she was two people doing the "one weird name" stage name thing until I went to click on her...name), and Nicolas Cage (Ghost Rider) as Dracula. Adding to the action-comedy/pop-culture cinematic franchise theme, we also have Ben Schwartz (Sonic the Hedgehog) being cast by an AI-generated MadLibs prompt as the son of Aghdashloo's character, and a bumbling, "threatening" heir-apparent to a Hispanic (?) drug cartel named Tedward "Teddy" Lobo.

I'll get to the rest later, including Cage's role, but the movie is called Renfield, so it only makes sense that we start with him. For those who don't know (and I barely do), Renfield is a former real-estate broker who first appeared in Bram Stoker's original novel, and has since been a character in every film adaptation of Dracula. He is usually depicted as a fanatically faithful servant of the former Impaler, tasked with bringing Dracula victims or potential companions of the night. He has borrowed immortality and a ravenous hunger for bugs (whether insect, arachnid, or otherwise is never explicitly stated--probably because entomological knowledge wasn't at a premium in the 1890s and 1930s, so a bug is a bug, though in this movie, he's shown mostly eating beetles, flies, and ants). Renfield is said to be a sequel of the Halloween: H20 variety--a "Dracula: D90," if you will, as Universal have committed some questionable intellectual property practices by digitally inserting the two Nicks into archive footage of the original 1930s Dracula, mimicking the performances of, and replacing, Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye in said footage. The other original actors in these scenes, however, were at least given proper credits.

The bulk of the film (as the "Dracula: D90" reference suggests) takes place ninety years later, with Renfield having grown weary of his servitude and joined a self-help group for people in toxic dependency relationships so he can semi-anonymously air his grievances about serving Dracula, while also using the other group members' tales of woe to Dexter up some food for the Master. As he is hunting one of the group members' abusive boyfriends, Renfield is interrupted by a Lobo Family hitman (because coincidences are coincidental, and the boyfriend is a thieving drug dealer), whom he kills, along with the boyfriend and his buddies.

The twist with Renfield is that he isn't just bug-hungry, he gets a share of Dracula's powers from eating them, and this turns him into a brutal, acrobatic martial artist with super-strength. Who only does the really awesome stuff with his back to the camera or in extreme close-up. Yeah, even though the fights in this are more coherent than in the usual "martial arts movie with lead who can't fight" fare, they are still quick-cut to Hell and back. They're ultra-bloody, too, but the blood is entirely and obviously above-par CGI, and looks like someone mixed strawberry Fanta with watered-down ketchup.

Also, because Teddy Lobo was waiting outside for the hit to finish and coincidences are still coincidental and Renfield walks out that exact door and Teddy killed Rebecca Quincy's (Awkwafina) dad and she's the only clean cop in a city full of cops who are all on the Lobos' payroll, now Rebecca wants Teddy in prison, Teddy wants Renfield dead (he's kinda too late on that, but whatever), and Renfield maybe wants Rebecca in bed when the movie's over, but also to be his own man, and maybe be a hero or something.

Rebecca is an okay character for Awkwafina. She seems a bit disjointed, like sometimes she's a serious, hard-ass cop, and sometimes she's just delivering Awkward-fina one-liners. Other than that, she's not very interesting in the scope of the movie. I get the feeling (with her last name being Quincy, her being the minority voice of law in a corrupt justice system, and the production parallels between the Dark Universe and Robin Hood--failed Cinematic Universe woes, previous rights ownership by Universal and Hammer, among others) that before this was re-written into a non-Dark Universe form, she was meant to be a descendant of Robin Hood of Locksley. Oh, and she has a sister in the FBI, which, along with the blatant, repeated instances of Teddy Lobo getting away with RICO-level felonies in clear view of the public, would have made it 

 to figure out that an entire city of cops and justice officials are dirty. But because comedy, blood, over-edited fight scenes, "twists," and giving a moment of thematic temptation to a heroine who is barely more than Renfield's damsel (but she has a gun!), the one, truly serious female character who could solve half of this movie's conflicts by getting more screen time and actually doing her job in view of the audience only gets a few minutes to show us that she's a verbally combative bitch toward her younger, less successful sister, and receive a third-act fridging at the hands of Dracula.

Ben Schwartz as Teddy Lobo gets a few comedy points for his first name being Tedward (which is never said in the movie), but he's too much of a whiny momma's boy (Shohreh Aghdashloo is effortless, amazing, and one of few--too brief--acting highlights in Renfield) to be taken seriously as a threatening villain, and when he turns on the camp to go there, Schwartz isn't nearly campy enough to rise (?) to the level of the rest of the film. Also (and I feel comfortable saying this because of other, ethnically and racially questionable casting choices in Hollywood's history), who looked at Ben Schwartz and said, "yeah, he looks like his last name could be Lobo"?

Speaking of the Lobos, there's a point where Teddy meets Dracula, and they join forces against Rebecca and Renfield, with Dracula giving the entire Lobo family Renfield powers. This was serviceable enough, but it's just Universal's version of the dark mirror villain trope, and they are taken out way too easily because Renfield has plot armor and a snuffbox full of CGI insects. It would have been slightly more interesting (if way too on-the-snout) if the Lobos had secretly been a centuries-old crime family of werewolves, Teddy was the odd, human child of the family, and they had some past conflict with Dracula, giving more dimension to Dracula and Bellafrancesca Lobo's (Shohreh Aghdashloo) brief exchanges during the third act. But this isn't a Dark Universe project anymore, and Renfield and Rebecca are "more important" characters, so let's stay boring and formulaic while quick cuts, severed nunchuck dummy arms, and digital Fanta-chup fly everywhere!

And sarcasm!

Finally, we come to the performance you've all been waiting to hear about: Nic Cage as Dracula. The trailer really hyped him as a point of attraction, but the movie is called Renfield, so if you were looking for more Vampire's Kiss meme action, prepare to be more disappointed than this review has made you already. Don't get me wrong; Cage as Dracula is definitely the other acting highlight in the pile of digitally caramelized ketchup-soda, neon-bright camp, and burning gothic rubble that is this movie. He pulls off the classic accent with a fair amount of consistency, delivers some of the iconic, Universal/Hammer lines (like, "I never drink...wine."), imbues his movements with a literal and metaphorical unhinged quality (he cited films like Ring and Malignant as physical inspirations), and speaks with a drawn-out, condescending, manipulative air of menace. If his character in Vampire's Kiss was of the "how hard can it be to alphabetize? ABCDEFG! HIJKLMNOP!...!" variety, Dracula is more like the "you don't say!" face

mixed with "before I came along, you didn't know how to alphabetize, and you'll never be able to alphabetize without me; isn't that right?" Plus he kills people and doesn't give a fractionally irrational shit (math paradox toilet humor!) what anyone thinks because he's evil and thirsty. But he's also out of touch and too lazy to get his own food. Huh; is Teddy Lobo just the straw man allegory to Dracula? Whatever; I'm done talking about that waste of film despite what little thematic value he might have for the main character's growth. Cage does a great job with Dracula, and the mix of practical and digital effects that go into his damaged, recovering design is clearly where the bulk of the effects budget went (to say nothing of his few levitation scenes or his third act death-by-burning), but he was deceptively advertised, considering how little he appears in the film, and it wasn't what anyone would call a "Full Cage" performance.

I had fun in the moment, and there wasn't really a time when I felt like checking the movie's progress bar to see how close to the end I was, but thinking it over after the fact, noting the obvious digital gore effects and over-edited fights, as well as the myriad of other problems and points where you could tell what movie(s) it used to be, it's clear why Renfield only made back a third of its budget.

D+

Hey, Ticketholders! Did you know that Fanta was invented by Nazis because Coca Cola didn't want to take blood money in WWII? Good on you, Coke!

Next week, more Sinbad, vampire movies, and my Just the Ticket viewership special with another Dexter reference, so Stay Tuned, remember to like and comment down below, Become A Ticketholder if you aren't already, follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content, and

Ticketmaster,

#notsponsored,

Out.