Once Bitten is a teen sex comedy pretending to be a vampire film.
Jim Carey, yes that Jim Carey, plays Mark, a teeneaged virgin wanting desperately to do it with his girlfriend, Robin, who's saving herself.
Luckily for him, he encounters The Countess, an immortal vampire queen who needs to feed on the blood of a virgin three times before Halloween to survive.
Luckily for her, she's found one.
With two feedings- she's saving the third for Halloween proper- Mark starts wearing black and acting odd. At his school Halloween dance- where The Countess and Robin have a dance-off competition for Mark's affections- he wins best costume as "vampire" while he keeps insisting he's not wearing a costume.
This must have been the only school in the world without a goth kid.
Carey's 1985 performance as a boy-next-door character foreshadows his everyman character in The Truman Show.
Lauren Hutton's Countess is less a femme fatale and more of a proto-cougar, but you can tell she's having fun with the role.
Both are eclipsed by Clevon Little as her fabulously bitchy butler/Renfield Sebastian- complete with a running gag of him spending time in the Countess' closet- she's constantly telling him to come out of it, to which he tells her he hasn't been in in years.
Once Bitten was enjoyable, but forgettable after viewing- my problem is that my bar on teen-sex-comedies is pretty high ( Porky's has a special charm of it's own that makes it difficult for me to objectively view TSCs. Yes Porky's. It's got little touches that make it better than the average TSC- for example, Kitty Wells playing on the jukebox of a bar) and I'm especially critical of vampire comedies, since so very few of them are actually funny. That said, Once Bitten wouldn't be out of place in a vampire marathon as some kind of palate cleanser between two especially violent or dark movies.
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