Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how the recent run of excellent films has come to an end — or, perhaps, sputtered to a temporary stop, awaiting fresh refills of petrol distillate. Schulz can’t give his heart to Renfield, ultimately, in spite of a top-notch performance by Nicolas Cage as Dracula, because of a stupid subplot, involving the New Orleans Mafia and a horribly-miscast Awkwafina as a straight-shooting cop, which manages to suck dry a rich and vital premise with such sitcom schlockola. (It’s also gratuitously bloody, which might be okay for a straight-up horror film, but for a horror/humor hybrid, it’s just plain distracting.) Schulz likewise ran cold on Nefarious, whose premise seemed custom-made for a horror film, or maybe just a kill-happy thriller, but as a “pro-faith drama about the evils of murder through abortion and euthanasia and the death penalty,” Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon’s 97-minute religious sermon is “a big, pushy screed, eventually, [where] you just don’t realize what [they’re] doing for a long time [in Schulz’s case, a half-hour-plus],” suffering from restrictions and tone-deafness that not even an exorcist could remove. Hold that thought. . . Concerning Sweetwater, a sports biopic about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, one of the first African Americans to play in the NBA, Schulz says that Clifton’s story is so good as to withstand whatever horrible presentation can be done with it — and director Martin Guigui seemed hellbent to test that premise. (“It is clichéd as all-get-out; there isn’t a surprise in it; [the film] goes for the lowest-hanging fruit constantly. . .  it’s like Hoosiers without any of the fun.”) But the premise held, despite all that, thanks in part to a robust cast (Richard Dreyfuss, Jeremy Piven, Cary Elwes, Eric Roberts — and, one presumes, Everett Osborne as “Sweetwater” Clifton). One of the Deez presses Schulz to call out the announcers, whom Schulz refers to as “Statler and Waldorf, but in their forties,” who manage to make basketball’s first slam-dunk a ludicrous occurrence. (“We’ve never seen anything like that before! That’s like dunking a doughnut in a cup of coffee! Let’s call it a ‘dunk’!” *shudder*) Concerning The Pope’s Exorcist, which, like all the other Exorcist films, purports to be based on a true story; and, since “no Exorcist movie is good unless it’s The Exorcist” (released 50 years ago), it’s already got a mighty cross to drag along. Is Russell Crowe, as the titular Pope’s Exorcist at the Vatican, actor enough to shoulder that cross across 103 minutes? Not with a “really laughably not-scary Devil” as his antagonist, making the proceedings feel like a dog-owner trying to bring his ornery bitch to heel. In the face of that, Crowe is a source of humor, partly because he’s given funny dialogue to deliver, partly because we see him tooling around Spain on a Vespa — but it doesn’t do a horror film any good when the best you can say about its cast is that its lead is “adorable.” And about the gangster comedy with Toni Collette, Mafia Mamma, it’s a film that you want to like because it has Toni Collette (and Monica Bellucci), but you can’t, because it was designed not so much as a comedy as Eat, Pray, Love-type self-actualization crap — which feels ludicrous in execution, given Collette’s suburban-housewife character is leveling up to Tony Soprano, FFS. As rich a comedic premise as that is, director Catherine Hardwicke plays her story straight, so consider MM a lost opportunity. Will the next batch of films redeem the souls of Mike Schulz and his fellow movie-goers for the time they’ve already thrown away so egregiously? Ari Aster’s three-hour Beau is Afraid looks like it could split either way; likewise Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, directed by. . . someone. Lee Cronin’s sequel to the 2013 Evil Dead remake has already received nasty reviews, but then, all the Evil Dead films have received nasty reviews initially, and the first three original films are now considered classics. Stephen Williams’s Chevalier, conversely, has received positive notices since its release overseas last September. And Somewhere in Queens, starring Ray Romano and Laurie Metcalf, directed by Romano, would be the third basketball-themed film our crew have seen in a row. Hey, everybody loves Ray Romano. . .

“Renfield,” “Nefarious,” “Sweetwater,” “The Pope’s Exorcist,” and “Mafia Mamma”