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The vampire’s a pain in the neck to his weary right-hand man (Nicholas Hoult) in the slick, fast-paced origin story.

“Renfield” has fine, crafty actors in its corner. The reliable Nicolas Cage, a guy who always gives 110%, is in there, sprinkling delightful expressions of enthusiasm (“wooo!”) under his Dracula breath. Awkwafina plays an honest New Orleans cop amid a sea of corrupt, mobbed-up toadies, with her sharp instincts for…

Renfield draws on the classical Hammer horror style Dracula and gives it a modern twist.

“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…