LOVE AT FIRST BITE
Directed by Stan Dragoti
Screenplay by Robert Kaufman
Count Dracula has always been something of a romantic. Given his undead state and his all too literal bloodthirstiness, his problem has ever been to find a socially (not to say legally) acceptable way of expressing his sweeter side. It is the funny premise of this movie that it required the intervention of the U.S. (circa 1970-79) to make the count begin to look good, despite his obvious kinks, to a lady.
Played by George Hamilton (and very nicely too), he is booted out of Transylvania by the humorless Communists who are going to turn Castle Dracula into a sports and recreation center. The count decides to go to New York City in pursuit of Model Cindy Sondheim (Susan Saint James), whom he recognizes from magazine covers as the reincarnation of the one woman he has really loved for some seven centuries. Cindy, alas, is not quite the innocent she was in her past lives. She divides her evenings between the discos and one-night stands, popping uppers and downers as if they were Good & Plenties and generally leading a thoroughly disorganized life. She has been having an affair with her analyst (Richard Benjamin) for years, but both are beset by the modern inability to make a genuine commitment. He, it turns out, is a descendant of Dr. Van Helsing, Dracula's old nemesis from the book, play and sequels. The analyst perceives his beloved's peril (three bites from the count and you go over to the undead). But since the setting is New York now, he has some difficulty persuading anyone to care about one well-mannered vampire, whose depredations seem mild compared with all the other forms of urban chaos. In point of fact, the count's passion for Cindy is obviously good for her, just what she has always needed to straighten out her life.
There is some racial joking in Love at First Bite that one could have done without. It is intended to prove that nothing is sacred to the film makers, but it just plays uncomfortably. There is also a flatness about Stan Dragoti's direction that prevents the film from realizing all its comic potential. But the performances (including that of Arte Johnson as Renfield, the count's bug-eating assistant) are uniformly jolly, the parody of the basic Dracula formula well observed and its social commentary deliciously off the wall. The production's genially tatty air enhances its anarchical mood and encourages one to go with its goofy yet often shrewd comic flow.
—Richard Schickel