The first time I saw Jim Carrey, he was a perfectly reasonable lead in a teen horror comedy. He was charming enough, and pretty good-looking, with just enough goofball relatability. That kind of actor was the genre’s bread and butter in 1985, a sort of handsome, self-deprecating kid who could carry a lightweight comedy about vampires without demanding too much of the audience, and Once Bitten needed exactly that.
For the uninitiated, Lauren Hutton is a well preserved 400-year-old countess looking for male virgins to keep her looking nipped and tucked, which in 1985 was apparently harder than it sounds. Carrey wanders into her orbit after his girlfriend refuses to sleep with him, and from there the film cycles through him slowly turning into a goth, while everyone around him notices he’s acting stranger and stranger. And wearing a lot of black.
Cleavon Little is along as the countess’s butler, getting the better lines and clearly having the time of his life. It’s a light, cheerful, essentially harmless entry in a genre that also includes My Best Friend Is a Vampire, Fright Night, Teen Wolf, and a half-dozen films that used the monster-puberty metaphor. Once Bitten sits on the shelf with that pimply bunch. It opened at number one at the box office, made ten million dollars, and then no one saw its reflection for a long time.
I had no idea I was watching a future superstar when I first rented it as a new release. Nothing about this performance telegraphed what was coming, and I saw little here of the guy who would create Fire Marshall Bill five years later, that cartoonish rubber-faced lunacy was barely there… but looking back, there are hints. When In Living Color debuted in 1990, I was watching what felt like a completely different performer. I only clicked a couple of years later, and once I did, Once Bitten became considerably more interesting as a record of Carrey before he’d found his footing.
The connective tissue between those two phases of his career runs directly through this film, as it happens. Damon Wayans co-starred with Carrey in Earth Girls Are Easy in 1988, saw enough to call his brother Keenen Ivory Wayans, who was putting together In Living Color for Fox. SNL had turned Carrey down three separate times before that, and on at least one of those audition days, Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman were the ones who got hired instead. The show that finally gave Carrey the right stage arrived through a chain of events that started with a cult alien comedy four years after this.
It’s worth finding for the casting curiosity alone, and its comfortable enough if you have a soft spot for the genre and haven’t come in expecting Fright Night. Lauren Hutton is having a fine time and is in fine form, and Jim Carrey is doing a perfectly competent job of behaving like a normal human.
-Pop
Once Bitten arrived on Home Video this week in 1986, after a November 15, 1985 theatrical release.