As delicious as Nicolas Cage as Dracula is, the rest of Chis McKay’s “Renfield” lacks bite.

Cage is allowed to be his batty self as he infuses his performance with elements of Bella Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Max Shreck and just about every actor who’s taken up the fangs before him, and deliciously, director McKay gives him all the space in the world to do what he wants. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie just never rises to the same level, even though Cage is more of a supporting character to Renfield’s (Nicholas Hoult) journey.

The overall premise is intriguing as it focuses on Dracula’s assistant and his struggles to overcome 100 years of waiting on the caped eviscerator’s every whim and need. So he joins a co-dependents support group to help guide him to essentially break up with his boss. However, the screenplay by Ryan Ridley, which based on an idea from “The Walking Dead” (comics) writer Robert Kirkman, struggles with itself in that there are two movies going on here: The first involves the nebbish Renfield trying to take his own power back so he may live his life as he wants to, and the second is a mediocre crime-and-drugs action flick.

The latter story centers around the drug-running Lobo family, specifically its grandstanding heir-apparent, Tedward (Ben Schwartz) and the beat cop Rebecca (Awkwafina), who wants to take them down.

Renfield gets looped into the Lobos when he takes out one of their hitmen while gathering victims for his boss, and he gets looped in with Rebecca when he saves her during a shootout against the Lobos.

Some of this action thread makes a little sense given Renfield’s wish at the chance to be a hero rather than a servant to a major villain, but it should have remained more of a secondary story. As is, it quickly overtakes the original guy-tries-to-quit-overbearing-boss plot, which is far more interesting and fun.

Instead of a kind of quirky horror-comedy, “Renfield” devolves into cartoonish action sequences full of gore and shocking ways to die. The violence is outrageous and laugh-provoking but it’s also laughable with the quality of stunt choreography mixed with shaky camera work, leaving an overall chaotic and messy result.

“Renfield” also misses a lot of opportunities. Taking place in a city that hypes up its own spookiness, New Orleans should have elevated a lot of the plot. Instead, the location seems incredibly arbitrary.

Similarly, there is a fun montage at the start of the film in which they re-create famous moments from the 1931 “Dracula” film with Cage filling in for Lugosi and Hoult taking the place of Dwight Frye’s Renfield. It lasts for a few minutes of screen time, setting the mood for the horror-comedy to follow and somewhat implying this is a kind of sequel to that Tod Browning film, but that first impression is shrugged off and again, made arbitrary by the battling storylines.

Despite the many flaws, “Renfield” does manage to make itself, at the very least, fun to watch. The acting is pretty steady throughout the cast, with Cage being the exceptional exception. There are fun moments of dialogue and situations that garner a few laughs, and there are attempts to bring that action-flick aura back to the roots shown early in the film. Ultimately, though, it leaves much more to be desired.

It is also interesting that as I watched the credits roll, I was struck by the inclusion of a credit for “dancers” and choreography, meaning there was a full choreographed dance scene filmed but not included in the actual movie. Eagle-eye viewers can get a glimpse of it during the credits, as they are paired with overly filtered still images of moments in the film — including that dance sequence, in which Hoult appears to have the time of his life. It honestly took me a minute to realize that scene must have been cut because I couldn’t decide if I had just somehow missed a dance number (unlikely given my theater-kid credentials) or if it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Because that’s the kind of movie I felt like “Renfield” was supposed to be — a campy little horror-comedy about how one man is finally able to overcome his co-dependence on the overbearing boss that lords over him. I wish we’d gotten to see more of it.

“Renfield”

93 minutes

Rated R for bloody violence, some gore, language throughout and some drug use.

2 stars

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