Jamie
It’s January 30th, 1991. You glance at the front page of the New York Times, but you aren’t here to marvel at the good and bad of the world. You are here on a mission. You want to laugh… hard. You flip to the TV listings. What luck! Right there on Fox primetime is Once Bitten starring Jim Carrey. In Living Color’s so hot right now. But you got a belly full of laughs that you gotta let out. You don’t just need one comedy, you need an all-nighter of comedy. Obvs you’ll catch Summer Job come 3 a.m., but the comedy pickings are slim when the night owls are out hunting for steamy thrills. Don’t worry, though, Lady Luck is with you tonight because at 1 a.m. you got Hot Pursuit starring John Cusack. Phew. And that, my friends, is how you build a big beautiful BMT Triple Feature.
To recap, Mark is your typical high school student just jonesing to lose his virginity. One problem, his girlfriend, Robin, wants it to be special. Oh no! (the opinions expressed in this film/recap do not reflect those of BMT). His friends are like “don’t sweat it, bro. Let’s go to Hollywood and pick up some chicks.” This predictably goes horribly until Mark is unexpectedly picked up by The Countess. She’s an older lady that the viewers know is actually a vampire. Turns out she needs to drink three times from the blood of a virgin in order to retain her immortality and control of her bevy of vampire underlings. Unfortunately, she’s having a terrible time in 90’s LA finding a virgin… you know… because of all the sex having, etc. That night she gets her first drink from Mark. Two more to go. The Countess is surprised, though, that Mark seems intent on making things right with Robin. As time goes on Mark starts to act more and more bizarre. Once The Countess gets her second bite, even Robin notices something is off. A bunch of gay panic ensues, but ultimately she figures out that he’s being turned into a vamp (as the kids say). There is a confrontation with The Countess at a spooktacular dance (best scene in cinematic history) which forces The Countess to kidnap Robin and lure Mark and his pals to her lair for a final showdown. As Mark and Robin attempt to flee it looks like they are going to be trapped by the vampires until Robin and Mark hop in a coffin and make sweet, sweet love to each other. This breaks the spell and The Countess fails. THE END.
I didn’t like this film much, although my recollection from catching it in pieces on TV as a kid was that it was weird and boring like some 80’s comedies are. I wouldn’t necessarily say that my beautiful adult mind now perceives it that way, but it does have a bit of a high concept problem. You have to buy in on the premise of the humor to really buy in on the film as a whole. So is the gender-swapped concept of a female vampire bedding the “last virgin in school” funny to you? Then you might get some goofy laughs out of the antics of his silly friends and a transcendent dance scene (truly wonderful stuff). To me it felt a little overwritten. Oh, and the gay panic in the film was so extreme that it’s hard to laugh past. On a brighter side I did think a couple vampire ideas in the film were presented in a compelling way, particularly the idea that the female vampire used her male familiar to apply makeup. And I thought the actress who portrayed Robin (Karen Kopins) was very cute and quite talented. She’s not the best actress, but it was so early (Carrey was also a bit rough). Acting can be learned and she seemed to have all the natural talent and charisma that could have made for a bigger career.
As for our Friend this week, Summer Job… uh… well, it existed. It certainly was put on film and released in some format. It is total garbage and actually makes me wonder how it is that someone makes something like that and thinks it’s normal or funny or anything at all. Nothing makes sense. It has no plot. All the characters pair off even though they are mostly gross and off-putting. It makes me question the entire Bring-A-Friend premise, except that this film played numerous times on TV in the 90’s! It was worth watching, but not worth the watch, if you know what I mean.
Hot Take Clam Bake! The Countess was actually dead the whole time. JK. I don’t buy for one second that she’s having trouble finding a virgin in LA just because it’s the 80’s. Mark’s two friends also appear to be virgins (one of them for sure). She could also rustle up a few down at the local church I’m sure. It’s all bunk. She just doesn’t want to admit a few things: 1) the virgin she finds would become part of their group and she doesn’t want any lame-o’s. 2) She’s so enthralling that the instant she “beds” an actually cool virgin he would become so empowered that he would bed another lady before she had a chance to drink his blood three times. 3) Even if that weren’t the case, the cool virgin would probably have a cool GF that she’d have to compete with. It’s a problem of her own making and really she should have taken one look at Robin and been like “Nevermind. Onto the next one.” She was Miss Connecticut! Hot Take Temperature: Rocking jazz dance number.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Are we talking about early Jim Carrey in a T&A comedy about being the last virgin in LA and being hunted by sexy vampires? Let’s go!
That about sums it up actually. While I agree the movie is a bit weird because of how flat Jim Carrey is, you can already tell he’s going to be a star because they seemingly pulled him off the street and he acts circles around all of the young actors in the film. His friends are dire. Not surprisingly neither did much else in their careers.
The love interest was interesting. She was very cute. Miss Connecticut in 1977. Her story is interesting in that she did a number of somewhat odd smaller films (like Jake Speed), and then married her high school sweetheart, had four kids, and still lives in Connecticut.
If this film has any enduring BMT legacy it is the dance scene. It is pretty incredible. Perhaps a life long project of mine will be to collect some of these MonoSklogs and Dance Sklogs on a private server so I can just watch them and appreciate them. They belong in a museum!
Which then prompted me to ask “I wonder if I can see what Karen Kopin’s talent was in Miss America and whether it was dancing.” It was. Jazz dance. But here’s the thing … like all of the competitors’ talents are dance. An inordinate number. If you look at 1975-1984 Miss Connecticut talent was Dance, Vocal, Dance, Vocal, Dance, Piano (+ Vocal), Vocal, Vocal, Vocal, Clarinet. That is basically the same for Miss America, although the preliminary talent winners often seemed to do something different like gymnastics, trampoline, jump rope, or even chemistry. The actual winners tend to sing in the end.
Oh this film has one of the most extreme examples of gay panic in the history of film. For some reason, despite the girlfriend already observing that Carrey has no reflection (super odd), she decides his friends should check for a bite mark near his dick in the showers. Naturally this involves wrestling him and trying very intently to look at his dick. Which naturally makes everyone think they are not only gay but, presumably, violent rapists. Anyways, they lament their soon-to-be ostracization from society for being gay, although instead they end up bedding some vampires and maybe also becoming vampires (results unclear).
The point I suppose is that this film is old fashioned, but because of Jim Carrey and because of the dance scene, if you can look past the occasionally extended scene where people drop f-bombs (and not the good kind) then there is enjoyment to be had.
Oh boy, for this film we ended up picking a small film as a Friend that (1) played on the same date as Once Bitten did on primetime network television (January 30, 1991), and (2) played a lot. Which led us to choose the unfortunate film Summer Job (1989), which yeah, played 39 times in the early 90s. Here’s the thing: this isn’t a movie. We could make this movie. It appears to have used regional actors from Miami, filmed in a few days at a country club in the off season, and hired precisely one reasonably famous person, a Playboy Playmate who has the odd notoriety of having directed a film starring herself and Patrick Dempsey. I’m glad we did this film though. Because we needed to at some point explore this bad movie space. But I don’t think we’ll revisit things like this if we can avoid it. The film is mostly unpleasant, and the acting is horrible. The only fun bit was the band at the end called Outkast which if I didn’t know better I would think the movie was just an extended music video for. F if you watch the whole thing, A+ if you only watch the Outkast music video at the end.
Twin film alert (Who?) for the two characters credited simply as Twin Vampires. I think a decent Product Placement (What?) for Crunch Bar. Setting as a Character (Where?) for LA as well. A very very nice Secret Holiday Film (When?) for Halloween. I think a genuine MacGuffin (Why?) for the virgin which the vampire needs to bite three times to remain young. And you know what? I like the twist that they get out of the jam by having sex. Thems a lot of superlatives. I think this is BMT for the dance scene alone, if you can tolerate or ignore the many many homophobic slurs that are tossed around.
Read about the long time coming sequel to Once Bitten (obviously called Twice Bitten) in the quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 