In short: Renfield (2023)

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), has been Dracula’s (Nicolas Cage) slave for many decades now as the submissive part in a pretty messed-up co-dependent abusive relationship. Well, at least he gets superpowers from eating insects, now, so I wouldn’t say Dracula never did anything for him.

Our protagonist is struggling badly with the horrors of Dracula, however, the guilt that comes with his complicity in many an outrageously bloody deed. By now, he’s at least an observing participant in a self help group for people with the less supernatural version of his relationship troubles, and feeds his peers’ abusers to his vampiric masters. In a couple of decades, Renfield might even have started on getting away from Dracula, but the vagaries of an increasingly idiotic plot drag him there rather earlier.

What’s good about Chris McKay’s Renfield is easily summed up in the words “Nicolas Cage”. His performance as this movie’s Dracula is incredible, channelling an amped up, combined version of earlier portrayals (most obviously those by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee) into the vampire as an embodiment not of some romantic bullshit, or animal magnetism, but of masculinity at its worst. There’s a sense not of actual intelligence about this version of Dracula, but some kind of violent cleverness, something so human it feels deeply inhuman even before we get to the evil vampire powers and the teeth.

Alas, this performance and the very sound and interesting basic idea are completely wasted in a movie that really rather would like to be some godawful noisy action comedy with random bouts of gore. Everything that could be thoughtful and clever is buried under reams of bad and obvious jokes and mediocre action sequences that are not improved a wit by being obnoxiously loud.

It’s just a waste, as is Awkwafina’s walking, talking plot device of a character or the usually dependable Nicholas Hoult who just looks bored and confused most of the time.

Three Films Make A Post: His bride was EVERYTHING he thought she was…and an air-raid warden besides!

British Intelligence (1940): This propagandistic little spy thriller is actually rather good fun, if you can cope with the limits of its budget and scope. The script is a bit dry and does include not just one but three big didactic speeches about the coming of Hitler (this taking place during World War I to enable a protagonist who is a German spy), but it works as a decently constructed spy mystery.

The film also features fine performances by Margaret Lindsay as our semi-heroine and Boris Karloff. The latter clearly has a lot of fun changing his body language and accent depending on whomever he’s talking to. Which is also a rather neat embodiment of the shifting identity of the kind of double, triple, multiple agent he’s playing here.

The Tomorrow War (2021): That’s a lot more than you can say about this monumental SF action stinker by Chris McKay, a film with a script so unsure about what it is actually about it goes on for thirty minutes after its core plot and relationship has been resolved. Adding insult to the injury of wasting my time by being about half an hour too long, the world building is preposterous – apparently, this takes place in a world where you can easily organize a worldwide draft, but nobody but our heroes thinks about where the enemy is actually coming from - and makes very little sense (even with some timey-whimey hand-waving). I could forgive all of this, if the film’s production design were less blandly generic (the monsters are a particularly boring example of badly digested Giger) and its big action set pieces were a bit more interesting. The direction and production values aren’t bad of course, there’s too much money pumped into the thing, but they also lack any spark of creativity or joy.

Hi Diddle Diddle (1943): This screwball comedy by Andrew L. Stone is a Tarantino favourite, and it’s easy to see why. The moments of meta fourth wall breaking and the play with generic tropes of the style of comedy this is are obvious points to haul the man in – and they do work for me too – but there are also very funny performances by Adolphe Menjou, Pola Negri (as a terrifying Wagnerian opera singer, and Menjou’s wife, no less) and June Havoc. Stylistically, this is as playful as it gets, with many short sharp little asides that bring the film to mind as a guy who just had a brilliant idea and now must tell you all about it. This distractibility in approach could kill any comedy’s pacing stone dead, if not for the fact that most of the distractions the film finds are funny and charming as all get out, enhancing instead of distracting.