Who Wants to Eat Flies?

Since we're pretty solid Nic Cage anti-fans, I wasn't sure about Renfield (2023) - but we watched anyway.

It features Nic Cage as Count Dracula, but really stars Nicholas Hoult as Renfield. There's a nice history of his relation to the count, done in the style of the Todd Browning movie. In the current day, Dracula is recovering from sunburn, while Hoult is going to support meetings for people in abusive relationships. He has been combining these problems by killing off the abusive partners and feeding them to the count. But Dracula wants the blood of innocents - happy couples, nuns, virgin cheerleaders. And he will get them.

Meanwhile, Awkwafina is a cop whose father was killed by the violent and politically connected Lobo family. She has been put on traffic detail so that she won't try for vengeance. But Lobo heir Ben Schwartz runs a sobriety checkpoint with a car full of coke, and she arrests him - which is not something you can do in this city. If you do, you face the matriarch of the Lobos, Shohreh Aghdashloo.

So there's your setup. Hoult's in a co-dependent relationship, Awkwafina's an honest cop surrounded by graft, and Cage is Dracula. I sort of felt like they were all in different movies - Awkwafina playing serious and earnest, as well as honest and noble, Cage doing a serious Lugosi/Schrek/everyone else impression, and Hoult tying it together as a Victorian learning about modern self-help and empowerment philosophy. They all do this very well - Hoult holds the center stage very well, Cage is an interesting vampire, but I felt that Awkwafina's inherent likeableness really made the show work. 

Also, the action. Renfield gains vamp powers by eating insects, and there are a lot of bloody, comicbook-style fights. Like, piles of corpses in the courtyard gory. If you like this kind of thing, you should watch this. If you don't, I don't think the rest of this movie will make it worthwhile.