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Thirty-five years ago, in “Vampire’s Kiss,” Nicolas Cage played a horrible boss. We couldn’t — didn’t want to — imagine that he could get any worse after first seeing his workplace antics; then the toxic-yuppie literary agent hooks up with a woman (Jennifer Beals) he strongly believes, after she bites him while they’re in the sack, to be an ancient succubus in the Carmilla mold. He spends most of the movie in thrall to the delusion that he’s becoming a vampire, which only exacerbates an unbearable-as-is penchant for cruelty that most affects, on the day to day, his long-suffering secretary (María Conchita Alonso). There’s something to admire about the ranting-and-raving over-the-topness Cage commits to in “Vampire’s Kiss” — it’s one of the best examples of the sort of frenzied, goggle-eyed acting with which the public tends to associate him most — though I find the movie, for the most part, so insufferable that it overshadows whatever perceptive observations about workplace abuse and white male toxicity, among other things, it may have. Cage’s performance is so grating that watching “Vampire’s Kiss” becomes, above anything else, an endurance test.

“Renfield,” directed by Chris McKay (2017’s “The Lego Batman Movie”), has a comparable conceit to “Vampire’s Kiss,” only this time everything develops from the point of view of the tortured employee and the movie is octaves less patience-testingly off its rocker. It’s way easier to like. I enjoyed it; it also practically evaporated from my mind on the drive home from the theater. (For everything that’s bad about “Vampire’s Kiss,” it at least makes an indelible impression.) 

Read the full column on South Sound.