DEREK 360: Let's watch movies: Once Bitten

Hey everyone!

Let's watch some movies.

Today I am going to talk about Once Bitten. Once Bitten is a chilling film from 1985 starring a before-he-was-famous Jim Carrey as the helpless victim to one-time-hottie Lauren Hutton's blood-thirsty vampiress. It's a story about dark forces and how said forces can be affected, both positively and negatively, by the personal choices a person makes...in 1980's California. It's a hardcore experience of a film. It's gritty, real and powerful and it makes everything Carrey has done since look like a bowl of burnt feces.

The movie opens by clearly laying out the troubling plot. The vampiress and her homosexual butler calmly discuss their problem. If she does not drink the blood of a virgin three times in the next ten days she will lose her youthful and totally ridiculously hot visage. She has been having a problem though. It seems that in 1980's California no one except kids are virgins and, because she is a vampire with a moral structure of blood drinking, she refuses to prey on kids. So what can she do? Her clock is ticking. The movie grabs you here and does not let you go.

From there we meet Jim Carrey's character. He is attempting to make love to his longtime girlfriend and she is resisting. Jim is defeated. Could he be the last virgin in all of California?

Naturally our two main characters intersect. On a chance night out at a Hollywood club Jim and vampiress cross paths and decide to go back to vampiress' house castle. From there lady vamp sucks Jim's blood (through his inner thigh...not the neck...Once Bitten does not trudge in the realm of the trite vampire cliche...it invents a new legacy of vampire fear and pain) and tells him that they made the sex like a couple of college kids hopped up on sugar-water and jelly beans.

At this point the movie has an almost playful air of fear. It's as though the film, unconsciously, is attempting to prepare the viewer for the lineup of tragic events that are to come. The viewer, however, can't be properly prepared for the visceral and unbelievable emotional ride they are about to be taken on. Jim Carrey's character spends the next solid hour of this masterwork of a film juggling the longtime girlfriend whom he loves and the vampiress who is clearly becoming more and more of a threat. This movie actually does what Fatal Attraction woefully attempted to do. Carrey's character begins to be torn, both through a physical transformation on par with some of the great visual performances of our time (i.e. Christian Bale in The Machinist, Jared Leto in that movie where he's a fat dude, etc.) and an emotional resonance that rips out the viewer's heart and breaks it again and again.

The movie is punctuated in a thrilling sequence that is Hitchcockian in its suspense and Speilbergian in its execution. In the end Carrey's longtime girlfriend must make the weighty decision to either give the man she loves the eternal gift of her virginity or watch him perish into the dark world of the occult. The choice she makes and the consequences everyone experience will move you to tears.

Normally I like to divulge prescious plot points in my reviews but doing that here would be patently unfair. Watch this film and as you are watching feel the feeling of knowing that you know that you are watching a film that needs to be needed and watched and let it run through your blood. It's powerful stuff.

+PROS+
+Everything.

-CONS-
-Nothing.

I give this film a 10.1 out of 10
-Derek