jellopuke
There are a few laughs here, but for the most part what you are watching is a movie that Jim Carrey is struggling to break out from but is being held back be either the by the numbers plot, the direction, or his own unwillingness to go crazy. Maybe this would be better remembered if they'd just cut him loose, but as it stands it more of a historical curiosity than anything. Decent, but nothing worth tracking down really.
PernillaP
Once Bitten is a fun and enjoyable comedy vampire flick. Reveling on the alluring number 3 and hellbent on going all the way for a home run it stars the holy trinity of Carrey, Hutton and Little in humorous and lovable roles. The story revolves around the vampire Countess (Hutton) and her need for a blood transfusion from a virgin. No bite in the neck, but further down is required. She's guided and aided by the brilliant Sebastian (Little) with a certain feminine twist that makes for many laughs. Juxtaposed to this duo of (very light) darkness we find a trio of restless youngsters and the protagonist of the movie - Mark (Carrey) who is trying so hard to get to fourth base with his girlfriend but not getting anywhere. He tries to metaphorically go to third base at a drive-in movie when the gear stick gets in the way of the couple and he says "Here, let me put it in third...". That's all he manages to do tho and they sit and watch the movie while all the other cars around start to bounce one after the other. Frustrated and let down he is talked into going to town to get...sorry... 'meet' girls with his two comic relief friends and soon enough he meets the countess and she lures him into her Hollywood mansion to get the first of three blood transfusions in order to retain her good looks. From there on strange and humorous things start to happen to the main character. It's a definitive 80's movie for sure. It's lighthearted and fun and if you expect some serious vampire business and action you will be sorely let down but if you're expecting comedy, teen desires, Carrey and light entertainment you will have a very enjoyable hour and a half of pure 80's nostalgia with a twist and you won't regret seeing it.
Coventry
Overall not-so-funny mid-80's comedy/horror (although you may take that second genre category with a spoonful of salt) that nowadays is only interesting as a curiosity because it features one of the very first lead roles of comical genius – at least according to some – Jim Carrey. Well, there's nothing even remotely genius about "Once Bitten". There are some inventive gags and admittedly even some sequences that spontaneously cause you to laugh (like when the sensual female vampire Lauren Hutton literally sucks the buttons off Carrey's shirt and spits them out into the air in all directions), but generally speaking this is a quite forgettable and tedious little 80's venture. Lauren Hutton plays a very frustrated 390-year-old vampire countess – cute little homage to the Elizabeth Bathory legend – on the constant lookout for virgin blood to boost up her energy. She finds ice-cream truck driving nerd Mark Kendall. He has a high school sweetheart whom he loves very much, but she thinks the time isn't right yet for sex and thus Mark is beginning to experience some sexual frustration himself. Easy enough prey for the countess, in other words, but the feeding on virgin blood occurs in repeated phases and Mark's girlfriend starts to fight back. "Once Bitten" has a slow and extremely boring start, but the pacing picks up after a while and even the jokes gradually improve a little. There's for example a downright awesome dance-off contest between the Countess and Carrey's prudish girlfriend during a Halloween party and to the tunes and lyrics of an appropriately entitled song "Hands Off". There's also a pretty great supportive role for Cleavon Little ("Blazing Saddles", "Vanishing Point") as the Countess' gay and black servant Sebastian. The fact that Jim Carrey's future career of comedy would entirely depend on his stretchy facial expression was quite obvious from his earliest films already. Here in "Once Bitten", for example, three quarters of his performance is put in by his mouth muscles.
Vomitron_G
So, Jim Carrey managed to build out a career after this flick? Wonderful. Okay, ONCE BITTEN isn't really a bad film. It's just a silly comedy. Jim Carrey plays Mark Kendall, a teenage virgin dude, full-time nerd and not all that smooth with the ladies. That is, until he meets Countess Lauren Hutton, who is in desperate need for some virgin blood to rejuvenate. Kendall gets seduced and bitten, starts acting weird, appears to become a bit more cooler and gets his potential love-interest to be more interested in him. But Countess needs to bite the virgin Kendall three more times to succeed in her evil scheme. Will she? The rest of the film, Kendall gets toyed around between his girlfriend and the Countess, which results in an actual highlight being a three-way dance on a party with both his girlfriend and the Countess trying to win him over. You can already derive from the way Jim Carrey acts in this film, that his legendary Ace Ventura character was already in him, at the time he made ONCE BITTEN.Good Badness? No, it's not bad enough. 5/10 and 5/10
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