leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (11/05/85)
ONCE BITTEN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: One more weak fantasy-teenage-sex-
comedy. Its humor is weak, its logic is weaker, and its
respect for vampire lore is non-existent. ONCE BITTEN is one
long unimaginative cheap shot.
ONCE BITTEN is an empty, dull, stupid comedy that is bankrupt of new
ideas. It is formula filmmaking, combining the all too familiar elements of
teenage sex, rock music with "video" written all over it, low humor in bad
taste, and fantasy elements (mishandled) as the excuse for all this. It
should be thrown in the same bin with WEIRD SCIENCE and TEEN WOLF and too
many others.
Lauren Hutton--who is a little old for the part--is a sexy vampire who
needs to have the blood of a virgin boy three times before Halloween. Shall
we stop here and list some things wrong with this premise? There is a lot
of vampire folklore to choose from and a lot of different kinds of vampires.
This "legend" has nothing to do with *any* of them. There is nothing in the
legends that I have ever heard of about anything three times and there
certainly is nothing about Halloween. Halloween is associated with Celtic
lands and the vampire legends are not. Walpurgis Night may have almost
worked in the film--it would have shown some minimal knowledge of the origin
of most vampire legends--but Halloween is extremely unlikely to be part of
any vampire folklore. The film implies that its invented vampire folklore
is *the* commonly accepted folklore.
But our sexy vampire is running into problems: there are no more
teenage virgin boys she can find. (Nod, nod, wink, wink, little kiddees.)
It does not take a whole lot of intelligence to come up with ways to find
teenage virgins, but it is a smutty joke to say there are none left. So the
writer made it a premise on which the plot turns. With the help of her
swishy homosexual daylight assistant--Cleavon Little--she goes in search of
the last virgin in the area. In the Thirties and Forties the comic relief
in film was often provided by a black who was expected to shuffle his feet
and act stupid. These days the swishy homosexual seems to be taking the
black's place. The homosexuality for humor is just one cheap shot in the
barrage this film lays down.
Jim Carrey is a teenager who has been unable to have sex with his
girlfriend so, of course, he is the last virgin around and the target for
Hutton's advances. That is the first two scenes and the only surprises that
remain in the film is where the film takes liberties with logic. This film
is a cut better than WEIRD SCIENCE, but it gets the same -2 on the -4 to +4
scale.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper