Pardon me while I mop up the 500 gallons of fake blood that came spilling out of these two films....
Fanboys and Fangirls, here's your double feature to die for.....awash in ripped limbs, slaughtered bodies and enough of the flowing, bursting red stuff to fill a dozen Olympic-sized swimming pools.....
There is, however, a distinct difference between these movies.....one unashamedly caters to hardcore gorehounds.....and nobody else.
The other one clearly aspired to wider appeal outside of its core demographic.....to become a mainstream crowd pleaser, steeped in hip, sick comedy and offering the spectacle of cinema's premiere oddball at the height of his lunatic powers......
Let's start with the latter, Renfield (2023).....which features a more than game Nicholas Hoult as Count Dracula's famous bug-munching minion and the mighty madman Nicolas Cage as Dracula, the role he was born to play....
Renfield, weary of several lifetimes of Drac's abuse, has joined a support group to verbally spill his guts, while rounding up fresh victims to literally spill their guts.....fresh blood for the Count to guzzle and thereby reconstitute himself after burning to a crisp from sunlight exposure.
Meanwhile, the last honest cop in the city (Awkwafina) constantly fails to nail the Lobo drug gang - an idiot, motormouthed son (Ben Schwartz) and his mastermind mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo, using her deepest gravel purr of a voice.)
Once returned to full-bodied, glowing eyed, razor-teethed glory, Nicolas Cage embraces the role of Dracula as if he's been waiting an eternity to bring the bloodsucker to life. He's hilarious, he's scary, he's out of his mind........it's Cage-0-Mania dialed up way over Spinal Tap's 11......
Throughout the jokiness, the film orchestrates gore-soaked battles involving thugs, cops, and assorted vampire zombies......bodies explode, limbs go airborne and gallons of corpuscles drench one and all. Finger lickin' fun for the fans, but in smearing itself with so much carnage, "Renfield" undid any chance of attracting anyone beyond the 'Fangoria' readership base.
(Speaking of which, the film had itself a real showstopping dance number with Hoult and a chorus line dressed up as his favorite treats, bugs and maggots.....but relegated it to a deleted scene on the DVD and Blu-Ray. Bad move, they should've left it in as a palate cleanser from all the massacres...)
......which probably didn't sit well with Universal Studios, who've been trying to jump-start their classic MonsterVerse for some time now.....(then again, their jumbo budgeted mainstream attempts, like Tom Cruise's misbegotten "The Mummy" didn't find an audience either.
Moving right along, let's now pop open the dreaded human-skinned Book Of The Dead to unleash "Evil Dead Rise", personally produced by the original trilogy's powerhouses Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell.
Unlike "Renfield"s higher audience goals, this more-of-the-same addition to the iconic demon-rampage franchise holds no pretentions about what it is and who it's for.......
The film serves up exactly what fans crave in Evil DeadWorld......90 minutes of start-to-finish frenzied, fiendish madness and mutilation........with hapless innocents turned into gibbering, glowy-eyed nightmares, ripping apart family members even as their own bodies break, bend and impossibly twist into inhuman positions.
But as Bruce Campbell famously discovered in the first of these films......there's nothing going on here that a swinging chainsaw can't cure in a hurry. And before it's all over, you can bet the still standing survivors will appear as fully showered in blood as much as celeb presenters doused in green slime at the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards.
So "Evil Dead Rise " remains honest and honorable in the purity of its intentions. No snarky humor, no splashy action-stunt stuff to bring in anything close to a mass audience. Just an unhinged 'booga-booga' trip to the slaughterhouse of the grindiest of grindhouse horrors.
Kind of a shame, really, for 'Renfield'. If they'd adjusted the blood spigot a little and shown some interest in ticket buyers who'd revel Cage-O-Rama, (not to mention love that goofy deleted dance number) those filmmakers might've enjoyed a bigger audience.......the 'Evil Dead' gang, on the other hand, knew their audience well and gave 'em what they came for....and more.
For the neither fish-nor-fowl 'Renfield', 2 stars (**). For the perfectly realized 'Evil Dead Rise' 3 stars (***). Proceed, as always, at your own risk......
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