Love at First Bite

Children of the night... shut up!

1979

Review: July 15, 2008

Director: Stan Dragoti

Starring: George Hamilton, Susan Saint James, Richard Benjamin, Dick Shawn, Arte Johnson

Not really necessary, I'm afraid.

THE SETUP:

Corny comedy in which Dracula returns to New York to reclaim his lost love.

DISCUSSION:

This is one of those movies I saw a million times when it was out—when I was 10, and there was only one movie theater in town. At the time I remember it as being totally amusing, but upon watching it again, it occurs to me quite strongly that I was 10—and there was only one movie theater in town.

We open with Dracula, played by a very game George Hamilton, hanging out in his castle. Renfield shows up with the magazines he asked for. He doesn't want the porn mags, he wants the fashion magazines, where he gazes upon the face of Cindy Sondheim, this model he's in love with. He mentions that she is an old soul, and is the reincarnation of Mina Harker [the character from the novel Dracula]. Renfield mentions that it's lucky that the cigarette case he gave Dracula prevented him getting staked by Van Helsing, way back when.

Soon Dracula receives notice that his castle is being repossessed, so he decides to move to New York. There's a long, completely unfunny scene in which he walks through an angry mob on his way out. At the airport in NY [I got a minor chuckle out of a sticker on his coffin reading: "Transylvania – JFK"] his coffin is switched with another, and he ends up waking up at a Baptist funeral where Sherman Hemsley is preaching.

The amount of casual racism that was permissible in your mainstream entertainments becomes quite noticeable [for the first time of many] when Dracula is walking through Times Square and is accosted for no reason by four black youths. He uses his powers to throw them all around, tossing the last of them through a store window—whereupon the guy promptly loots a television.

So Dracula sends Renfield out to find Cindy, who dresses hilariously like a "model" as she walks down the street in her tight gold pants and wife beater with NO BRA [she has rather large aureoles, we note—from forty feet away]. He tells Dracula that she'll be doing a photo shoot in central park that night, and he turns into a bat—literally a toy bat that can barely flap it's wings, hanging from a string, which is kind of charming in its total lameness. He accidentally flies into the window of a black family—are you ready for shockingly casual racism, part II?—where there is a family of about seven sitting around with nothing to eat, when they spy the bat and shout "A black chicken!" and try to capture it. Can you believe this? And the whole idea that this was just ACCEPTABLE.

So Dracula goes into a disco where he finally meets Cindy. She is played by Susan Saint James, blonde here, and looking somewhat like Gilda Radner. You get a sense of the corny sense of humor of this movie when Dracula says he wants to offer Cindy eternal life and she says "I knew it! An insurance salesman!" They eventually hit the floor and tear it up in a disco number that was originally set to "I Love the Nightlife," [a credit for which appears in the end credits, and which is featured quite prominently on the trailer], but is here replaced by some generic disco number. It only occurred to me upon hearing it played 34 times in the trailer that the whole "I Love the Nightlife" sentiment is supposed to be some sort of joke.

Either it gets worse from here or it was always equally bad and only my nostalgia buzz kept me going through the first half. I'm afraid it was the latter. Dracula and Cindy go home to her place, where she pops pills and smokes some "Maui Wowee." He bites her, and when he gets back to his place, he's stoned! Hoo boy did that crack me up. Oh by the way, we find out that her hair up until now, and through the rest of the movie, was a wig, and really her hair is a short Betty Buckley in Eight Is Enough-style. I cringe to think how few people will know what I'm talking about with that. She is having an affair with her uptight, neurotic Jew therapist, played by Richard Benjamin. This is not treated as being at all inappropriate. He is a descendent of Van Helsing [making this whole thing SO much like Dracula AD 1972], and a lot of the comedy that follows is that the SHRINK is acting CRAZY! Can you believe the wackiness? There is further appalling racial stereotyping when Benjamin argues that a black kid arrested for stealing hubcaps should be released, as he won't steal again. The kid puts on an innocent act, obviously saying whatever to get out of the situation, in the process offering more stolen goods as gifts—and is later seen stealing tires from cars.

I can't go into it any further. Suffice to say, what is the most amazing and hilarious thing when you're 10 is NOT necessarily the same when you're an adult. What this movie has going for it is George Hamilton [never thought you'd see that sentence, huh?], who is amusing in his spoofing his already ludicrous sensuous lover image, and Susan Saint James is a very amusing and refreshing presence. She later went on to be half the show Kate and Allie, then retired. This film is also very genial and goofy, on the plus side, but the downside of that it that it is just so corny. Most of the humor is the kind that makes you heave a deep sigh and want to hit yourself in the head. I would only recommend this if you have kids under 12—and even then, I would use it as a springboard to a discussion on racial stereotypes in movies and how they were once widely acceptable, with a follow-up discussion on how/if things have changed today.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Probably not. It's good-natured, but also really stupid and corny.