Renfield. MA15+, 93 minutes. 3 stars
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One of my favourite jokes asks what Sean Connery said when his sister had a baby, the answer being, "It's a little niche!"
Boy oh boy, is this kooky film a little niche.
Chris McKay's horror comedy about the familiar from Bram Stoker's iconic vampire novel - living and working, still, all these years later, as Dracula's personal assistant - is perhaps too niche to find the audience it really deserves.
But it is a ton of fun, in its own right and in the layers McKay imbeds in loving homage to the classics of cinema and horror literature.
One hundred and twenty-five years after Irish novelist Bram Stoker made a legend of him, Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage) is still up to his old tricks, falling in love with beautiful women, being evil and evading religious groups and monster-hunters.
That's a lot filling up the schedule of a centuries-old vampire, and so it's lucky that he still has his loyal old familiar, R.M. Renfield (Nicolas Hoult), to fetch bodies and clean up the blood.
A century earlier, Renfield was a practicing lawyer sent to deal with the Count in his native Transylvanian castle, and made a deal to gain eternal life and a superpower of his own by becoming Dracula's familiar.
One century into the deal, however, Renfield feels the relationship is one-sided, a feeling reinforced by his friends in his co-dependent relationship support group.
Having recently faced down some assassins, the Count has an extreme case of sunburn, leaving Renfield plenty of time to explore feelings his group sessions bring up.
Hunting down some of the people his support group tell awful stories about puts Renfield in the line of local New Orleans police officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), which puts them both in the firing line of a local drug-dealing vampire crime family headed by Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her son Teddy (Ben Schwartz).
First and foremost, what a cast.
Both Cage and Hoult riff on characters they established earlier in their careers - Cage in the 1988 comedy Vampire's Kiss, played a vampire obsessive, while the undying Renfield isn't dissimilar to Hoult's 2013 zombie-with-a-heart-of-gold from Warm Bodies.
The leading men play against each other nicely, with the bumbling and lovable Hoult a foil for Cage's note-perfect over-the-top bloodsucker.
Wonderful comedy performers round out the cast, notably Schwartz (Parks and Recreation fans know him as the awful Jean Ralphio).
Awkwafina's police officer character feels off-note - not because she isn't as fun as she always is, it's because she is leading-character-famous and leading-character-successful, so the love interest role is a waste of that talent.
Casting decisions aside, the screenplay from the team of Ryan Ridley, Robert Kirkman and Ava Tramer tries to be many things and succeeds at many of them.
This is sometimes a buddy cop film, and the music from Marco Beltrami is at its most fun in those moments, but it is also a workplace comedy, and the writers nail the dynamic of the narcissist boss and the put-upon employee.
The production team double down on the violence and gore (there also seems to be an R-rated version of this film, though that's not the one playing at our local Dendy Cinema), and their art department and cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen must have had a ball creating the old-school vampire film special effects.
