A little something for the weekend?

The 1980s saw the revival of the horror/comedy, a sub-genre Universal pretty much ground into dust in the 1950s with all those Abbott and Costello Meet [Insert Name Here] movies and then beheaded, dismembered, and drove a stake through the heart of in 1966 with The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Thereafter the sub-genre slumbered fitfully in its coffin for two decades, only to reemerge in the 1980s with An American Werewolf in London.

If you haven’t seen it, An American Werewolf in London is definitely worth watching. (The belated and almost unrelated sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, far less so.) The practical makeup effects are genuinely shocking, the horror aspects are actually frightening, and the humor in it is not just a succession of gags and cheap double entendres but actually clever. More to the point, it showed what could be done with the genre using modern (by 1980s standards) film making skills, a serious budget, and a good cast.*

[* An aside: John Landis wrote the original script for American Werewolf in 1969, but it took him ten years to find a studio that wanted it. At one point Universal expressed interest but only if he cast Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi as the two lead characters. You may take a moment now to shudder in sheer horror at the thought of what that movie would have been like.] 

In Hollywood nothing succeeds like success, so the critical and commercial success of An American Werewolf in London spawned a flood of new films in the 1980s that tried to find that horror/comedy sweet spot and cash in. Some are painfully unwatchable now: e.g., Transylvania 6-5000. Some have become iconic: e.g., Gremlins, Ghostbusters, or The Lost Boys. Some are weird but interesting: for example, The Hunger, Fright Night, or Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat. (I have often wondered if Charlaine Harris watched Sundown before she came up with Sookie Stackhouse and True Blood, and thought no one would notice if she lifted a few ideas from that old flop.)

By the 1990s the horror/comedy genre had pretty much run its course, leaving us with two terrific but now nearly forgotten 1992 films, Innocent Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—forget the TV series and all its many spinoffs, the original 1992 movie is far better than you remember it being—and one leaden, plodding, late-to-the-party, utterly unfunny turd, Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Along the way, though, the sub-genre also produced one surprisingly pleasant little confection: Once Bitten, starring Lauren Hutton and Jim Carrey.

Yes. That Jim Carrey.

I was dimly aware that this film existed, as it’s been showing up in edited-for-television form on the downmarket channels for years. I’ve seen parts of it before, but never the entire movie, from start to finish, in the theatrical release cut, until recently. 

That was a pity. I’d forgotten that there was a time when Jim Carrey was actually young, fresh, and funny, and not the tiresome and insufferable thing he is now. I’d forgotten that there was a time when a major Hollywood studio could make a movie that was lighthearted, romantic, entertaining, and yet only 94 minutes long. I’d forgotten how Cleavon Little could totally steal a scene just with a single word or a gesture. Most of all, I’d forgotten it was possible to make a movie that was a bit risqué and contained “adult situations” without going either Full Monty or Full Saccharine and Insipid.

The plot, such as it is, is this: Lauren Hutton plays “the Countess,” a 400-year-old vampire who must once a year feed three times on the blood of an adult male virgin in order to keep her eternal youth. The complication is that she’s living in Los Angeles, and in Los Angeles in 1985, adult male virgins are very hard to find. Enter Jim Carrey, as high school senior Mark Kendall, who doesn’t want to be a virgin, but his pretty and wholesome girlfriend, Robin, played by Karen Kopins, is making him wait. So Mark and his two dimwitted high-school buddies hatch up a plan to take a road trip to Hollywood, to see what they can find, and the plot is off and running…

This is not a movie that will change your life. This is not even a movie that tries to be anything more than lighthearted and entertaining for an hour and a half. There is no gore, no violence, no nudity, only a few four-letter words, and the final battle between Robin and the Countess—did I forget to mention that Robin is the hero?—becomes a dance off.

This is also a movie that probably could not be made today, just based on Cleavon Little’s performance alone, and that is so neutered and watered-down in the edited-for-TV version that it’s worth going out of your way to find the theatrical cut. 

Recommendation: a fun movie to stream on a rainy Saturday night. Make popcorn.

Categories: movie reviews