Blood sloshes and Nicolas Cage feasts in ‘Renfield’

"Renfield" is not Nicolas Cage's first blush with a vampire.

In 1988's "Vampire's Kiss," he played a New York literary agent who thought he was an immortal bloodsucker. His bug-eyed performance was essentially the birth of the over-the-top, kabuki-inflected mythology of Cage. Years later, it would launch a thousand memes, a kind of digital version of becoming undead.

Thirty-five years later with "Renfield," Cage is finally playing the genuine article, complete with bloodthirsty fangs and a dapper velvet smoking jacket. Casting Cage, our grandest of ghouls, as Dracula is so predestined that it almost risks being too on the nose. The good news is that, no, he's perfect as Dracula. The bad news is that Cage's Dracula is only a supporting role here, making "Renfield" more of a tasty morsel than a satisfying feast.

That's no discredit to Nicholas Hoult, who plays Bram Stoker's devoted henchman to Dracula in Chris McKay's "Renfield," which opened in theaters on April 14.

The film, penned by Ryan Ridley, fashions Robert Montague Renfield less as Dracula's doting, "yes Master" lackey than a distinctive and sensitive person or kinda person; his supernatural powers are sustained, for some reason, by eating bugs — in his own right. "Renfield," a fast and loose horror-comedy splattered top to bottom with blood, is about Renfield trying to break free of Dracula's fearsome sway, "a destructive relationship" as Renfield describes in a self-help group.

It's a nifty enough idea (Robert Kirkman gets a story by credit) that the filmmakers have wisely chosen not to over complicate. Even though "Renfield" features a monster with growing desires for world domination and an alarming number of exploding human heads, the stakes are low in this Dracula...