“Nosferatu” - Let bygones be bygones.

Movie theaters are not the best places to take a nap. There is a screen with bright light reflecting off it, loud noises often emanating from all around the room, and other people around you. On the flip side, it is a dark room, with very comfortable temperatures, and, in some theaters, plush seats that recline and heat up. For me to doze off during a movie in a theater, I usually have to be really tired or the movie has to be incredibly boring or uninteresting. While I didn’t fall completely asleep during Nosferatu, I threatened it many times.

That’s not to say Nosferatu is a truly boring movie. It has plague rats, jump scares, a damsel in distress, a creepy vampire, and Willem Dafoe. On paper, that’s the opposite of boring. Yet I found myself fighting to keep my eyes open at multiple times. And I wasn’t that tired from a normal day at work.

I think the main problem for me is Nosferatu is a throwback film to a very bygone era that I’m not interested in revisiting. The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a German silent film appearing in 1922. That’s not a typo. Today’s Nosferatu is a remake of a literal one hundred-year-old movie. And the remake isn’t a reimagining so much as it’s a straight remake, just with that newfangled sound technology to capture actors actually speaking. Or screaming. There’s a quite a lot of screaming.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this new Nosferatu feels like it was made one hundred years ago. Many of the film techniques - like straight shadows of hands and silhouettes to elicit terror - are reused to great extent. Much of the film is either straight black-and-white or using filters that wash the color out so much it might as well be black-and-white. And so much of the movie is shot in near darkness. Look - I get it. Not being able to see what’s happening induces fright, but for me it also induces heavy eyelids.

The other problem is the story is missing an element to tie everything together. The vast majority of the original film’s story (stolen from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) stays intact. Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) Hutter are recently married and trying to build a life together. Thomas is sent to Transylvania to assist Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in closing on some property in the German town Wisborg where the Hutter’s live. As a younger girl, Ellen had been stalked by Orlok and Orlok’s goal in moving is to take full possession of her. While Thomas is away, Orlok is able to haunt Ellen’s dreams again, causing strife with Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), the Hutters’ friends who agreed to house Ellen while Thomas is away.

The story continues with Thomas’ harrowing escape from Orlok’s castle, Orlok’s voyage on a ship to Germany where the entire crew dies and the ship wrecks in Wisborg’s port, and Thomas enlisting the help of Dr. Siever (Ralph Ineson), Friedrich, and Professor von Franz (Dafoe) to hunt down and kill Orlok. What’s missing from the original story in this remake is Ellen never discovers a book on vampires (one that Thomas originally finds in Orlok’s castle) that informs her how to rid the town of Orlok. This is a key thread through the original story because it provides discovery for both Thomas and Ellen and becomes the reasoning behind their actions. In the remake, von Franz exposits all vampire knowledge to the other men, but never to Ellen, so Ellen has zero agency through the entire film. Like how Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has no bearing on the fate of the Nazis, we could remove all of the non-vampire men from Nosferatu and the story would still end the same way - with Ellen and Orlok’s final consummation. The difference is Ellen is an unwilling participant this time around and that’s pretty boring.

I want to stress that Nosferatu is not a bad movie. I can appreciate how much effort went into it to capture the feel of a one-hundred-year-old movie. I enjoyed the performances from the actors, particularly Dafoe and the always amazingly terrifying Skarsgard. I could have done without the bombastic sound threatening to split my skull at times, but I get why it was done that way. It’s just none of those things were enough for my interest to sink its teeth into and keep my eyelids from having a mind of their own.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back in today’s money.

“Renfield” - All bite and no bark.

Six years ago, Universal Studios attempted to start a franchise called Dark Universe that was supposed to feature a bunch of classic horror characters. The first movie, The Mummy, did exactly what I predicted it would do. Namely, it crushed the franchise in its infancy. With the Dark Universe stomped to dust, Universal did what any studio desperate to revive intellectual property would do - hire Nicolas Cage to play Dracula in a movie titled Renfield.

While Cage’s last movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was a critical success, it was not a commercial success. Cage’s box office results over the past fifteen years have been pretty ugly. The last non-animated success Cage had was 2007’s National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Since then, Cage starred in a string of mediocre to eye-coveringly bad movies. Massive Talent worked primarily because it featured Cage making fun of his own life and career, but that film probably doesn’t work with any other actor. Either Cage begged Universal to let him be Dracula or Universal never saw Season of the Witch.

Credit to Universal for trying something different with Dracula. Renfield is an action comedy told from the standpoint of Renfield (Nicholas Hoult). It’s not absurd like Dracula: Dead and Loving It, but it’s also not serious like Interview with a Vampire. Renfield attempts to follow the path of Warm Bodies, presenting a light-hearted romp humanizing the traditionally loathsome Renfield. Where Warm Bodies cast zombies as sympathetic characters needing to rediscover emotions to become human again, Renfield casts a sympathetic character trapped in a codependent relationship with Dracula, looking for a way out of Dracula’s control to become human again.

The good news is Renfield is entertaining. The heart of the film is apparent in every action sequence, bodies exploding in fountains of bright red blood, body parts being torn from torsos then used to kill more bad guys, and enough novelty deaths to make Chuck Norris proud. The frantic and choppy camera work in these scenes left something to be desired, but it wasn’t distracting enough to detract from the scenes.

Also quite entertaining are the performances from Cage, Hoult, Awkwafina, and Ben Schwartz. All of them were noticeably enjoying themselves, especially in those action scenes. Schwartz makes the most of this opportunity, playing a drug cartel lieutenant with a zeal and gusto that comes from knowing exactly what kind of movie this is. Awkwafina plays Rebecca Quincy, a traffic cop bent on trying to take down the cartel. While Quincy is tragically underdeveloped, Awkwafina provides much of the comic relief and even manages to pull off action sidekick. Hoult shines as the title character, though like Quincy, he suffers from far too little character development. Hoult is convincing as both an action star - featured in several scenes piling up a body count - and a charming and disarming everyman just trying to get back his life. For better and for worse, Cage overshadows all three of them.

Cage is clearly channeling the Nicky Cage of his youth, chewing up scenery and delivering a very memorable and depraved Dracula. It wasn’t a perfect performance as his enthusiasm caused him to break character a couple of times (once during a rant in Renfield’s apartment and again during the climactic fight scene). We’ll forgive him though since he had to deliver his lines through a mouth full of sharpened teeth.

The bad news is Renfield suffers from an incoherent and scattershot plot that exposes how hard the film needs to lean into its over-the-top action scenes to paper over its bad writing. A main component of the film is that Renfield attends support-group meetings for people in toxic, codependent relationships. In the right hands, this theme could be really funny and clever, but the screenplay goes for the obvious and mostly unfunny play. Renfield describes his relationship with Dracula as a generic work relationship to group leader Mark (Brandon Scott Jones). Mark tells Renfield to stand up to his boss (Dracula) and take his power back. The joke here is obvious - a play on words because Dracula has actual supernatural powers - but it falls flat because the movie never commits to breaking the codependency as the main motivation. Instead, the film throws in the drug cartel, an entire city of corrupt cops, an extremely weak attempt at a romance between Quincy and Renfield, an abandoned family, and Dracula’s desire to take over the world. But Renfield wears an ugly sweater after ghosting Dracula and that’s funny...maybe?

In addition to the failed theme, the film is riddled with inconsistencies and head-scratching decisions. After Dracula is nearly killed during an opening flashback scene, we’re told that Renfield is responsible for providing victims for Dracula to heal himself and that the recovery process is very slow. We are even treated to a delightfully grotesque, half-constituted Dracula hobbling around on a cane, complaining to Renfield that he wants to feast on cheerleaders and nuns instead of drug-addicts. Yet, Dracula quickly becomes fully healed despite Renfield delivering no more victims after that.

While we may be able to overlook that plot hole, it’s far more difficult to understand why the entire New Orleans police force needed to be corrupt in this story. The drug cartel provides plenty of cannon fodder for the fight scenes, so why insert a bunch of cops? Like with the support group, the corrupt cops subplot seems to be there to generate cheap laughs, but it too falls flat, especially since Quincy’s FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) literally works down the hall.

When I weigh the good news against the bad news, the good news squeaks out the win. While the bad writing pulled the movie down several notches, I found more than enough glee in the action and performances. It was a little disappointing that the movie didn’t try harder to write a better story, not to mention fleshed out characters, but it’s rare to find such reckless abandon in action sequences work so well. We’ll never see the Dark Universe that Universal envisioned, but at least they managed a fun Dracula.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back - the action sequences weren’t that good.