Love at First Bite / Once Bitten Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Love at First Bite / Once Bitten Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 9, 2015

Note: The scores above are averages. See the reviews linked below for individual scores.

There’s probably little doubt that the overwhelming critical and box office success of Mel Brooks’ lunatic Young Frankenstein made bean counters in Hollywood sit up and take notice. Hollywood is after all Ground Zero for imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and so it’s no wonder that other creatives decided to take a stab at satirizing various horror outings. What’s a bit surprising is how long it took. Brooks’ send up of the most iconic man made “monster” of all time appeared in 1974, but it wasn’t until five years later in 1979 that another Universal horror legend got the same treatment, with Dracula being played for (supposed) laughs in Love at First Bite. There’s a bit less of a through line to 1985’s Once Bitten, a film that might be thought of as a quasi-parody of Dracula’s Daughter, since it revolves around a female vampire. Unfortunately neither of these films had what made Young Frankenstein so memorable—namely, Mel Brooks and an unparalleled cast of comedy heavyweights. Love at First Bite is the better of the two films in this Blu-ray double feature, but it hasn’t aged particularly well (unlike its subject blood sucker), seeming a bit more pointlessly manic now in hindsight than it probably did upon its original release, when it was unexpectedly popular with audiences and at least some critics. The less said about Once Bitten, the better, for it’s a tired, unfunny enterprise that has gained whatever small cachet it ultimately achieved due largely to the fact that it offered Jim Carrey one of the first major roles of his film career.

Complete coverage of each film in this release can be found by clicking on the following links:

Love At First Bite Blu-ray review

Once Bitten Blu-ray review

Love at First Bite / Once Bitten Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Assessments of the video quality of each film can be found by clicking on the above links.

Love at First Bite / Once Bitten Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Assessments of the audio quality of each film can be found by clicking on the above links.

Love at First Bite / Once Bitten Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Supplementary material (i.e., trailers) for each release is covered in the above linked reviews.

Love at First Bite / Once Bitten Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This double feature offers one decent Dracula satire and one pretty lamentable one. Love at First Bite has a rather large fan base which includes many who grew up watching it repeatedly on television, and those folks will probably be willing to either tolerate or (more likely) ignore Once Bitten. Taken as a "single feature" with Once Bitten considered as a kind of meaningless "supplement," this release comes Recommended.