The idea for the movie came from both George Hamilton himself and producer and screenwriter Robert Kaufman, with the seeds being planted one day when the two of them were having fun and Hamilton began doing an impression of Bela Lugosi. But, he runs into an obstacle: Jeffrey Rosenberg, Cindy's psychiatrist and neurotic on-again, off-again boyfriend, who also happens to be the grandson of Dracula's old nemesis, Dr. Having bitten her once, Dracula now intends to bite her twice more to make her into a vampire too. The two of them go back to her apartment and he treats her to a night of incomparable sexual passion. There, he finally meets her, and while it takes a little doing due to her jaded and rather flaky nature, he manages to spike her interest.
Despondent, Dracula is about to give up even trying, when Renfield reveals he got the name of a nightclub Cindy frequents from her secretary. And when he does find someone to bite, it's a drunken hobo who gets him drunk as a result. He suffers further humiliation after he gets out when he tries to find someone to feed on as a bat, only for them to either be annoyed or so desperately hungry that they try to eat him.
Dracula thus arrives at the shoot but is unable to get close to Cindy due to a cop keeping the crowd back and winds up in the dog pound after he turns into a doberman and pees on the cop's leg in retaliation. Using a cobra to scare Cindy's agent into telling him, he learns she has a photo shoot at Central Park that very night. Making his way to the Plaza Hotel where he's supposed to be, he tells Renfield to learn of Cindy Sondheim's whereabouts while he's resting during the day. Upon arriving, his coffin is accidentally taken to Harlem and he emerges in the middle of an African-American funeral. When he fails to sway the government officials, the two of them do depart Transylvania, much to the happiness of the local villagers, and head for New York City. Unfortunately for the infamous vampire, the Romania government has decided to turn his castle into an athletic training camp and he's told that he and Renfield have 48 hours to get out. Also, the other characters are quite a mixed bag and the premise feels like it's running out of steam just over halfway through the movie, making the third act somewhat lethargic.Ĭount Dracula is in love with Cindy Sondheim, a New York fashion model whom he is convinced is the reincarnation of a woman he loved centuries before and encountered again in London in 1931. It's also competently directed and fairly funny at points, although there are moments where it seems like it can't make up its mind whether or not it wants to be a farcical spoof in the Mel Brooks vein (that said, I enjoyed this a lot more than Dracula: Dead and Loving It). It's not a dynamo by any means but what it has going for it is a delightful performance by George Hamilton as Count Dracula, who manages to be charming, seductive, and funny, as well as rather sad when he laments his wretched existence, and an equally fun performance by Arte Johnson as Renfield, who does a nice impersonation of Dwight Frye's laugh from the original Dracula.
In any case, this is another movie I'd never seen until I decided to review it as part of this year's October Fest, and after watching it several times now, I think it's perfectly fine. I was surprised by that, since it wasn't a movie I'd heard many people mention, but upon looking it up, I've learned it was one of the top twenty highest grossing movies of 1979 and was also one of the most successful independently-produced films for many years.
#LOVE AT FIRST BITE FULL MOVIE SERIES#
Maybe it was original back then but, when I look at that title after seeing and hearing so many variations of it, I think to myself, "Boy, has that become a cliche." Like a lot of movies, I first learned of it from the filmography in the back of that Monster Madness book, and also, when I read a book on horror films from a series published by Virgin Books (the book is just called Horror Films), it claimed that Love At First Bite was the highest-grossing vampire movie until Bram Stoker's Dracula.
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