We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
RENFIELD (2023)
Universal had been planning to build a cinematic universe called the Dark Universe; a series of reboots of their classic monster movie properties that would allow for crossovers like in the days of House of Frankenstein and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (but more like the current Marvel Cinematic Universe). But they messed up. By pumping so much money into the first film in that series – The Mummy – they made it so that film’s $410 million global box office was a disappointment. So they changed plans. Instead of building the Dark Universe, they would just have filmmakers reboot classic monster movies as stand-alone projects, no need for world-building or crossovers. That worked out when The Invisible Man earned $144 million on a budget of $7 million. But now they’ve made a misstep with this approach as well: they made the Dracula comedy Renfield on a budget of $65 million. The result: $24 million at the box office.
But Renfield is only a misstep for the financiers, because most of the genre fans who have given the film a chance have found that it’s a really fun, blood-soaked piece of entertainment. Sure, most of the blood may be CGI, but it works for the cartoonish-ness of the violent moments, and there are some cool practical effects here and there as well.
Directed by Chris McKay from a screenplay by Ryan Ridley, who was working from a story supplied by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman (who also produced the film), Renfield is sort of a follow-up to the 1931 version of Dracula... you just have to overlook the scene in Dracula where the Count killed his lackey Renfield. The story of this film picks up around a hundred years later, in present day, where Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) is still doing his master’s dirty work and getting tired of it all. Now set up in New Orleans, Renfield attends a toxic relationship support group, the idea being that the toxic people in the lives of his fellow attendees will be the people he chooses to be Dracula’s latest victims. But Renfield also sits in on these meetings because he is in a toxic relationship with his boss. Soon enough he decides to step away from the orbit of Dracula, with mixed results: he meets a potential love interest in police officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), but also finds a new enemy – local mobster Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz), the bumbling son of criminal queen Bellafrancesca Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Rebecca has been trying to bust Teddy Lobo, but hasn’t been successful because the Lobos own most of the police force. Around the time Renfield enters the picture, the situation between Rebecca, the Lobos, the Lobos’ many henchmen, and the corrupt cops escalates into all-out war. Which brings a lot more bloody violence into Renfield’s existence.
Luckily, Renfield has gained some superhuman powers from his master, and he doesn’t need to feed on the blood of humans to activate those powers. He just has to snack on some bugs.
Of course, the climax requires more than just a showdown with the Lobos. Renfield also has to find a way to defeat his own master. I thought Dracula himself was going to be a major drawing point for this movie, because it gives us the chance to see Nicolas Cage play the iconic bloodsucker. But judging by the box office, not too many movie-goers were in a hurry to see his performance. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I was impressed by the way Cage played the role. He’s got a classic Dracula creepiness to him for the most part, but also works some classic Cage line readings in there as well.
I really enjoyed Renfield. My only disappointment was in seeing just how quick the cameos from William Ragsdale from Fright Night and Caroline Williams from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 actually were – although it was nice to see them in the movie at all. It’s a shame the film hasn’t done better, but it’s going to find its audience at some point and will be appreciated as a solid horror comedy as years go by.
The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
ORGAN TRAIL (2023)
Studios and production companies will often try to get around marketing their horror releases as straightforward horror movies. This is how we get the term “elevated horror”. It’s a marketer’s way of trying to get across the idea that the horror movie they’re promoting isn’t your average horror movie. This is something special, a movie to be held up above that other trash called horror. Given this aversion to accepting the horror label, it’s surprising to see that Paramount has chosen to market director Michael Patrick Jann’s cleverly titled Organ Trail (inspired by the real life Oregon Trail, a wagon route that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon back in the 1800s) as a “Horror Western”… because by doing so, they have slapped the horror brand on a movie that I wouldn’t have considered to be a horror movie otherwise.
Organ Trail does have its share of corpses and bloodshed, and it has a band of bloodthirsty bandits traversing the snow-covered countryside, but rarely did its moments of tension or violence have me thinking, “Wow, this really is a horror movie!” Horror didn’t cross my mind until the film had almost reached the end credits, and that was only because one of the bandits turned up after unexpectedly surviving an event that looked like it should have been the end of him. He has the resiliency of a slasher.
Jann could have learned further into horror territory, could have made the film more intense… but he usually leans the other way. Organ Trail is a movie with such an achingly slow pace, for most of its way-too-long running time it feels like Jann was more interested in making his Western a ponderous arthouse movie. The screenplay written by Megan Turner could have served as the basis for something much more impactful, with a quicker pace. 112 minutes weren’t necessary to let this story play out; it probably could have been brought to the screen as a lean and mean movie with a running time of 90 minutes or less. And it would have been a lot more interesting and entertaining if it had.
The setting is Montana, 1870. A family of four – Zoé De Grand Maison as our lead character Abby, plus Mather Zickel, Lisa LoCicero, and Lukas Jann – flee from a blizzard only to come across the scene of a massacre. There’s one survivor: Olivia Grace Applegate as Cassidy, who has been left to die with her hands pinned down with arrows. The family saves her, patches her up, takes her into their camp… and in the night, the four bandits who carried out the massacre (Sam Trammell, Nicholas Logan, Alejandro Akara, and Michael Abbott Jr.) show up and do the same to Abby‘s family. They take Abby and Cassidy back to their base of operations – and from there, the movie slowly tells the story of Abby‘s attempt to get free of her family’s murderers… while hoping to hold on to her family’s horse, which she considers to be her last remaining family member.
There are bursts of action and violence here and there, and characters played by the likes of Clé Bennett, Jessica Francis Dukes, and Thomas Lennon also get mixed up in this bad situation along the way. But while those moments of action and violence are refreshing, and while Jann and cinematographer Joe Kessler made sure that Organ Trail is a nice movie to look at, it all happens way too slowly and the character interactions are either too low-key or (when the bandits are talking to each other) too irritating.
I like Westerns and I like horror movies, and I enjoy when elements of the two get mixed together. I wish horror Westerns would get made more often. But regardless of whatever genre labels you want to put on Organ Trail, I didn’t have much fun watching it. I found it to be quite dull. There are some good ideas in there, but the lumbering execution wasn’t right for the story.
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