One of the streaming channels, I think on Pluto, has been running a movie that I have to admit was new to me: One Bitten. The synopsis sounded interesting, so I recently sat down to watch it.
Cleavon Little, who died much too young, plays Sebastian. He's a sort of butler/factotum in a Los Angeles mansion, serving his boss, the Countess (Lauren Hutton). If you didn't figure it out from the title, it should become obvious once Sebastian opens a coffin and lets the Countess out, telling her it's sunset, that the Countess is in fact a vampire. Not only that, but she's a fairly old vampire, on the order of several centuries, despite the fact that she doesn't look anywhere near it. That's because she's learned the secret for vampires of looking young. Aparently, you have to taste the blood of a virgin three times once a year, in the run-up to Halloween. This will also turn the person biten by the vampire in the vampire themselves; the Countess is keeping several of her conquests in the basement.
Meanwhile, Mark Kendall (a very young Jim Carrey) is a gawky teenager at one of those suburban Los Angeles high schools that popped up quite a bit in teen movies in the 1980s. He's got a girlfriend in the form of nice girl Robin (Karen Kopins), and drives an ice-cream truck as an after-school job to earn extra money. Being a teenage boy, he's also sex-obsessed, wanting finally to lose his virginity and hoping Robin will go along with him. But she's a nice girl, and not yet ready to lose her own virginity, no matter how much she loves Mark.
So Mark and his sidekicks Jamie and Russ go out to a singles bar in Hollywood that's decidedly 80s in tone: people sit at numbered tables and you can call up the other tables on an internal phone line to flirt/introduce yourself to someone in whom you're interested. Yeah right, like somebody's going to be interested in these three high school boys.
Except of course that the Countess is there, and she immediately recognizes that these three boys are virgins, leading her to call Mark over to the bar. She brings him back to her house, puts the moves on him, and... bites him as part of the sex act. Unfortunately, Mark has had enough to drink that he doesn't remember much of what happened that night.
However, he starts acting strange. The audience knows that it's because he's showing the initial signs of becoming a vampire, but of course the people around him don't know any of this, at least not until Robin starts doing a bit of searching. She keeps seeing the Countess, who is stalking Mark, and Robin is not about to lose Mark to anybody. This is important once the Countess makes the final preparations to bite Mark the third time and turn him into a vampire for good.
As I was watching Once Bitten, I found myself thinking of Earth Girls Are Easy, since that's another movie from early in Jim Carrey's career that has similar themes of a fish out of water and sex. Personally I slightly preferred Earth Girls Are Easy, but Once Bitten is also a lot of fun. It's not a perfect movie, and you can see why some people might not like it so much, but it has a lot of energy and knows not to take itself very seriously. The comedy also holds up 40 years on. Once Bitten is just a rollicking good time, and definitely worth a watch.
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