Bram Stoker’s estate had some nerve suing the makers of Nosferatu, the 1922 German horror film, considering that the Dublin writer had stolen the story’s core idea from Transylvanian folklore in the first place.

Renfield (16, 93mins)

Nosferatu was the original vampire movie, the first of hundreds, and since then we’ve had Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Gary Oldman and countless other interpretations of the suave count with impeccable manners and unseemly appetites.

Now, in Renfield, the B-movie Brando has a pop at old Dracula, and with Nicolas Cage, you never know quite what you’re going to get. Certainly not subtlety.

Dracula, though, is not the protagonist of Chris McKay’s spoof horror, which instead focuses on the thankless life of Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), a greedy Edwardian toff who hitched his wagon to the vampire’s star after The Great War and is now stuck with him.

Immortal, but troubled by the role he plays in procuring victims for his master, Renfield now dwells in the shadows of present day New Orleans, where a chance exposure to a 12-step recovery meeting shows him the error of his ways.

When he blurts out his woes to the group, its leader Mark (Brandon Scott Jones, easily the funniest person in this film) explains to Renfield that he’s trapped in a relationship with a narcissist.

That’s putting it mildly, and Dracula, who’s recovering from a Van Helsing-style attack that left him severely depleted, insists that Renfield find him more and more victims.

Not any old victims either, for the blood of criminals and other low types doesn’t help the Count regenerate — he needs innocents, nuns preferably, or “a bus full of cheerleaders”.

To add to Renfield’s problems, he becomes the enemy of a local drug gang after coming to the assistance of a stubborn policewoman, Rebecca (Awkwafina).

When Renfield eats insects, his eyes turn gold and he acquires superpowers: after he strangles, stabs and disembowels a dozen hoodlums in a bar fight, Rebecca calls him a hero.

Renfield’s head is turned: he falls in love with her and vows to become a better person. That will involve ditching Dracula, who isn’t about to let his lackey go without a fight.

Renfield is a busy film, with lots of balls in the air at once. Not content with transporting Dracula and his sidekick to New Orleans, Chris McKay and his writers Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman have thrown in a crime story, with Shohreh Aghdashloo playing a stylish mob boss, and Ben Schwartz as her idiot son.

They exist solely to justify the presence of incorruptible cop Rebecca, who in turn only exists so Renfield will fall in love with her.

All these subsidiary characters are badly written, lazily drawn, and Awkwafina’s comic acting skills are criminally underused. 

The film’s best scenes, those with most comic potential, are Renfield’s interactions with the 12-step group. Had the film been confined to him, Dracula and the worthy sub-language of self-help, we might have had an amusing comedy on our hands.

Instead we have gore, and lots of it: when Renfield fights, heads pop, innards spill, blood pumps, bodies sunder.

This carnage plays out with cartoonish flourishes, and we’re clearly meant to find it funny. It isn’t though, it’s merely unpleasant, adding nothing to story or spectacle.

Which is a pity because Cage’s Dracula is louche, camp, bad to the bone and highly entertaining.

Appearing at first in various stages of decay, he quickly transforms into the strutting, overdressed Count, his coy smile revealing a ghastly set of individually pointed teeth.

The eyes roll, his soliloquies rise and fall from a whisper to a shout, his accent aspires towards the British.

All of which reminded me of late period Margaret Thatcher, and who knows, this may have been the great man’s intention.

Cage’s performance is almost worth the price of entry, but there’s not much else to be said for this nasty, trashy film.

Rating: Two stars

Barber (15A, 90mins)

A neo noir, an erotic fable, and a bit of a dog’s dinner, Fintan Connolly’s languid thriller stars Aidan Gillen as Val Barber, a Dublin private detective with a hangdog look and a troubled past.

A former cop who’s not well liked by his associates, he spends most of his time spying on unfaithful spouses, so is intrigued when a wealthy widow (Deirdre Connolly) asks for his help in locating her missing granddaughter, Sara (Isabelle Connolly).

His enquiries are hampered by Tony Quinn (Liam Carney), a cop and former colleague who wishes Barber ill, and by his own messy personal circumstances. He’s close to his troubled teenage daughter, not so close to his ex-wife. Barber’s gay, though not exclusively, as we discover when he bumps into Lexie (Camille O’Sullivan), a femme fatale with underworld connections.

Barber is nicely shot across Dublin, and Nick Dunning, Gary Lydon and Aisling Kearns flesh out a decent cast. But the whole thing is stiff as a board, muddled and unconvincing, and stilted performances bounce off each other with dull and hollow thuds. 

Rating: Two stars

One Fine Morning (15A, 112mins)

Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning stars Léa Seydoux as a Parisienne with a lot on her plate. A single mother who works as a translator, Sandra spends most of her free time looking after her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a professor of literature whose brilliant mind is being rapidly consumed by a neurodegenerative disease.

Unsure of his surroundings, baffled by everyday objects, Georg is no longer able to live on his own, so Sandra, her sister and mother must find a care home fast.

Most are depressing, none seem suitable, and meanwhile, Sandra has bumped into an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a charming scientist: he’s married, but they fall in love.

Life gives, life takes away, sometimes in the same moment, and Sandra is torn between the happiness Clément brings and the sight of her disintegrating father, whose heaving bookshelves are now the only extant representation of his mind.

Greggory is excellent as Georg, and there’s a wonderful, unaffected chemistry between Poupaud and Seydoux. A wise, wistful and strangely uplifting film. 

Rating: Five stars