Renfield and Cocaine Bear were the two movies that I was most looking forward to this year. How unfortunate that both were such disappointments. I guess that I’ll have to look forward to The Flash (for which I have very mixed feelings).

Renfield

Robert Montague Renfield was once an enthusiastic young lawyer with a wife and child. Sometime in the 1890s, in an effort to secure a lucrative land deal and realize his ambitions, he ill-advisedly solicited Count Dracula. From that moment until the present day, Renfield has been the Prince of Darkness’s slave, serving him the blood of innocents in exchange for immortality and a taste of power.

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Then one day, while stalking his master’s prey, he came upon a self-help group for abused co-dependents, and, for the first time in centuries, his eyes were opened to the possibility of a life without his dark master’s influence. Now, armed with a seed of self-confidence and a self-help book, Renfield goes on a journey of self-discovery to become the healthy independent man of which he dreams.

Sounds like a pretty sound foundation for something interesting, doesn’t it? Well, read the plot synopsis for the other half of the movie, and tell me if you think the two make sense when put together.

5-foot-nothing rapper/comedienne professionally known as Awkwafina, who is best known for her 10-year-old YouTube song, “My Vag,” plays a hard-as-nails yet goofball cop in a precinct full of dirty cartoon cops owned by the very crime family responsible for the abduction and murder of her father. Now, consumed by her pain, she vows to take revenge and bring the crime family to justice…by cursing a lot and openly and publicly mocking the precinct for being on the take, also she makes silly faces.

To say that, in a vampire movie, hers was the only performance to truly suck, would not only be cliche, but accurate. For half of the movie, her performance is reminiscent of a fish flopping around where it has no business being. For the other half, she looks lost in the company of her betters. Truly, it felt as if the only direction that she got from director Chris McKay, was “Just do what you do.”

This was a really challenging film to critique because, unlike the tragically outclassed Awkwafina, Nicholas Hoult gives his usual excellent and nuanced performance that almost always elevates the material that he’s given. Furthermore, Nicolas Cage is riotously funny as Dracula, hamming it up and chewing on the scenery with his oversized canines in exactly the way that you expect from him. When the two are together, their chemistry is otherworldly. That’s why it’s such a travesty that theirs is actually the C-plot.

The main storyline is the flat and unearned admiration that Renfield feels for Awkwafina’s (I feel like a child even writing that name) Rebecca because he saw her stand up to a group of bad guys. That’s right, somehow in over two-hundred years he’s apparently never seen that, but now he has and, thanks to the power of boners and feminism (which ironically do not mix), he sees a path to once again being a fully realized and independent man.

If that’s not bad enough, the B-plot of the Lobos Crime Family trying to do whatever they are trying to do (I honestly can’t remember and don’t care to find out) felt like the discarded script for a Joel Schumacher Batman movie. The direction wasn’t any better. In fact, the only thing missing was ice skates popping out of the bottom of Dracula’s shoes and Arnold Schwarzenegger making bad ice puns.

When the fangs retract and the high from sucking the life force from unsuspecting victims has subsided, half of Renfield is a 0% in every one of our rating categories, while the other half is in the 80s to 90s…maybe even a couple 100s. If this ends up streaming for free on a network that you already have access to, you should definitely watch it just for the good half.

WOKE ELEMENTS

• Every man is either a moron, disgusting beta male, dirty cop, evil murderous henchman, or a centuries-old blood-sucking vampire.
• Only the two intersectionally appropriate Hollywood quota-filling female cops are worth a d@mn.
• Awkwafina is 5’1″ but is able to take down men three times her size in hand-to-hand combat.
• With only the two women as exceptions, law enforcement is treated as though they are all dirty. There’s even a sign on the precinct wall that says “Don’t solve crime till overtime.”