Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 1987 Kathryn Bigelow movie Near Dark. Today, he looks at the 1985 Howard Storm movie, Once Bitten. This article will contain spoilers.
I’ve repeatedly said that I don’t think I’m ever going to watch something for this column that achieves the depths of straight-out bad across all four quadrants that BloodRayne (2005) managed, and for another week that remains true. But we’re holding on by a thread here. The only part of that field that Once Bitten (1985) didn’t conquer is incompetence in craft — this production was, at the very least, staffed and run by professionals. This is an extremely low bar to clear, and almost every studio release in the United States will clear it, but BloodRayne didn’t and there you have it. In every other respect, Once Bitten really is a contender for the worst vampire movie on the list.
So what are we dealing with here? First, it’s a comedy from the middle of the Reagan presidency, so it’s got that working against it from the word go. What’s worse, it’s a high school sex comedy. Now, we’ve already looked at a vampire movie from 1985 that features teen sex comedy elements in the original Fright Night, so we know this stuff can be done acceptably well to 2025 eyes, even if you spend some time going, “Yeah, that sure is 40 years ago,” about this or that. They’re not doing it acceptably well here. Our lead is a 23-year-old Jim Carrey who has not figured any of his schtick out yet; it’s weird to see only bits and pieces of the presence he’d become in the 90s poking through, but most of the time he’s playing his role as one of the only male virgins in the greater Los Angeles area pretty straight. What was a fairly silly concept at the time — and clearly keying off of contemporary older generational freakouts about kids these days having all of that godless teen sex — feels almost alien this far down the line. That’s not a huge problem in and of itself, however. The transphobia, the homophobia, the plot-important locker room shower scene that’s one giant shower rape joke; that’s what grates. And it doesn’t even have the decency to be funny in the margins of any of this stuff. It’s just bad writing, start to finish.
The plot is that the vampire Countess (Lauren Hutton) needs to drink the blood of a young male virgin every so many years to preserve her eternal youth. This has become difficult, apparently, because there are simply no more young male virgins anymore, due to widespread pre-marital sex in America. So she goes out hunting and alights on Mark (Jim Carrey), a virgin whose frigid, uptight girlfriend of apparently six years (???) won’t put out no matter how much he whines or takes her to the local romantic hot spot, which is like a parking lot somewhere in Santa Monica where all the other teens are already getting it on. She has to drink his blood three times over the course of some number of nights to complete the process — the script isn’t super clear or super picky about the process here, you’ll be shocked to discover — and as she does so, Mark will slowly transform into a vampire. Great. You can see the arc of the plot already: She’s gonna get the first two, the love of his life is gonna intervene, realize she has to lighten up and fuck him to save him from becoming the vampire’s eternal thrall, and we’re gonna get out of here in 90 minutes.
This is basically what happens, but almost every single moment getting there is just rancid. The supporting cast here drags; Mark has two virgin buddies who take up way too much screentime mostly to do all the gay and trans-bashing “humor” that is beneath the attention of the lead, while the Countess has a coterie of vampire servant dorks she’s turned over the centuries, all of which are lazy pulls with TV show vibes: A confederate soldier boy, a cockney moll-style girl in fishnets, a hippie chick, a cabin boy, and a pair of greaser-style 50s twins looking like Temu Johns Travolta. The cockney and hippie girls are here pretty much solely so that the last scene they and Mark’s two friends have in the movie can end with the girls dropping their dresses while shot from behind and the two virgin idiots going “G-g-gawrsh!” all googly-eyed. At least in this context there’s some plot justification for it — the two girls are presumably gonna kill and eat the boys right after the camera cut — but it’s all very trashy and slipshod.
So is the production! The lighting is generic studio-shot TV sitcom lighting, even as they shoot on location at this big house in the hills they’ve commandeered for the 45 days of production they had for this pile; the transitions and shot framing and shot composition and just everything about this whole enterprise screams “television,” and there’s a reason for that. Director Howard Storm has 53 credits in that position between 1975 and 1999; all but two of those are on television shows or made-for-television movies. This is one of his actual film projects. The other? Penthouse Video Magazine, Volume 4. Storm is what you might tactfully call a journeyman of the television business; he would never get another shot at the silver screen after this, and frankly, that was a good call on Hollywood’s part. His last work was directing four episodes of Kenan & Kel, so he did eventually creatively contribute to an American classic.
There is one bright spot in this entire film — well, two. The lesser of the two bright spots is a third act extended dance sequence at prom where Jim Carrey actually hits his marks really well, because Jim Carrey was always secretly a fantastic physical actor. It’s the only time he, Hutton, and Karen Kopins (the TV actress who plays Robin, the uptight girlfriend female lead) are actually asked to do any work in this slop, and they do it well. Unfortunately, the song sucks, but all the songs in this movie suck, and Storm leans on so many of them (and their attendant montages) to pad the runtime out to even an hour and a half.
The one actual bright spot in Once Bitten is the great Cleavon Little as Sebastian, the Countess’s evil gay butler Renfield. The role is written and shot as insultingly as you’d think, calling for the lisp and the mincing and all of it; the script is quite pleased with an exchange where it contrives for him to literally hide in a closet, so that the Countess can order him to come out of the closet, and he can do so while retorting that he’s been out of the closet for centuries. Then he does her makeup for her. The key here is that Little, a veteran of the New York theater scene, just buys in 110% to the role and decides he’ll both go full camp and play the butler with arch, malevolent dignity. He steals every scene he is in; the bits of the film where it’s just him marching around the mansion to Spanish dance music in high leather boots making sure all is just so in his mistress’s realm are the best in the film, because at least there’s someone interesting doing an actual performance in them. Little died too young from colon cancer, and when he was alive and working never found the career his talent deserved — you know him from Blazing Saddles and precious few other roles. Maybe his brief time on True Colors, in one of the final roles of his career. Certainly not from this piece of work.
The last fifteen minutes turn into a live-action Scooby Doo chase around said mansion with the vampire boys popping out of the woodwork, from behind doors and extremely cheap looking prefab breakable walls, and getting bonked on the head or socked one in the jaws by our two leads as they run away. The movie was already bad; this bit is miserable. Eventually, as you can almost see the time and budget running out on the screen in front of you, the leads hop into a coffin together and shut the lid; when the Countess and her vampires run in and throw it open, it’s too late! Mark is no longer a virgin; he and Robin already had sex, and it lasted like 45 seconds. Maybe the one passable sex joke in the whole affair and it comes as everyone’s speeding through their final lines before credits hit, superimposed over the coffin that they retreat back into to screw some more.
In a way I actually appreciate having to watch Once Bitten, because next time I start in on the Twilight franchise, and I didn’t want to begin that journey after watching a good movie that I liked; this way, the first one of those will compare favorably to the last thing I watched. So look for the beginning of that journey coming soon, and sign up for our Patreon if you want to be on the list of people who get to choose what to inflict on me next.
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