Your tolerance level may vary, but I found this an enjoyably silly diversion. It’s quite sweet, and it’s not at the expense of the psychiatrist, who gets to walk away with the main cop (shades of Casablanca here) and Dracula’s cape, which both men are convinced will aid considerably in their romantic lives. Most (all?) Dracula films end with him being burned by sunlight or staked, failing to get his bride, but here he successfully turns James into a vampire, and then they turn bat and fly off together. That said (spoilers ahead!) I did like that he actually succeeded for once. Not that it bugged me much, but D ead & Loving It and Vampire In Brooklyn, while inferior films IMO, definitely made more of an attempt to cater to both fanbases. He does transform into a bat at one point, which is pretty hilarious (a poor family trying to figure out how to get its next meal assumes it’s a black chicken), but even the climax feels more like a traditional romantic comedy (it involves a race to the airport!) albeit with the male lead in a cape. I don’t think he kills anyone in the movie (there’s a blood bank scene to explain how he stays nourished), and most of the displays of his power are to telekinetically open doors and turn on “mood music” during his dates with Susan Saint James. I should note that it’s barely a horror movie even by horror-comedy standards. The actor is Richard Benjamin, better known for his directing these days, but he’s got a fun sort of Steven Colbert-ish demeanor here, arrogant yet clueless, and ultimately well-meaning. He’s a bit fuzzy on the exact ways to kill a vampire, which has some fun results: after shooting Dracula through the heart with silver bullets, he tries to get out of arrest by pointing out that he mixed him up with a werewolf and that he’s actually fine. But again, I was surprised at how much DID still work, particularly the hilariously inept psychiatrist who is also a descendent of Van Helsing. Of course, as with any comedy of this sort, there are as many groaners as laughs (pretty much anything revolving around Renfield is laugh-free), as well as some dated material that distracts from the fun. Hemsley’s scene is pretty hilarious actually he’s giving a eulogy for a guy whose coffin got mixed up with Dracula’s at the airport, mostly giving the deceased guy props for all of his sexual conquests (a guy in the crowd even proudly joins in: “He banged my old lady!”). And when you have Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford contributing small roles (at the height of The Jeffersons’ popularity), you have to assume that they didn’t have any trouble with the movie’s tone. It feels a BIT racist in retrospect, but it’s not meant to be - you gotta remember that the world wasn't so damn PC back then, and thus it's no different than the language in the classic Chevy/Richard Prior sketch on SNL. Interestingly, it also has several African-American supporting characters like that film, although many of them are stereotypes (when Dracula throws a black street punk through an electronic store window, the guy loots a TV as he climbs back out). If anything it’s closer to Vampire In Brooklyn than Dracula. Hamilton plays Dracula, and he’s got Renfield, and as always he’s looking for his eternal love, but otherwise it doesn’t really follow the Stoker story: no Harker, no Lucy, etc. Part of the success is due to the fact that it’s not a direct spoof of the Dracula story as the other film was (I only bring it up because I specifically remember the "Fangoria" article about Brooks’ film dismissing this one), which keeps them from having to force comedy into situations that are ill-suited for such things. That it was actually pretty fun is something of a minor miracle while the should-be dream team of Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen failed to lampoon Dracula in the shockingly bad Dead And Loving It, this one actually manages to more or less work. There are fewer actors that are as synonymous with “cheesy” (to my generation anyway) than George Hamilton, and fewer sub-genres in horror more littered with garbage than the horror-comedy, so the fact that Love At First Bite was even watchable was a surprise.
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