Disco Dracula!

In 1979’s Love At First Bite, George Hamilton plays Dracula, who goes from living in Transylvania to trying to make it in New York City.  Even when you’re the King of the Vampires, it turns out that New York can be a difficult place to live.  No one has much respect for the tanned man in the cape, even after he shows off his powers.  He falls in love with a model, Cindy Sondheim (Susan Saint James), but she doesn’t buy into the idea that he’s a vampire.  She’s a New Yorker and she’s in therapy.  Her therapist, Dr. Jeffrey Rosenberg (Richard Benjamin), is a direct descendant of Prof. Van Helsing and he does believes that “Vladimir” is a vampire but he can’t get anyone to believe him.  When he takes his concerns to the NYPD, Lt. Ferguson (Dick Shawn) dismisses him as being insane.  Which, to an extent, he is but only because no one will believe him….

Meanwhile, Dracula’s faithful servant, Renfield (Arte Johnson), starts every morning by leaning out of his apartment window and pretending to be a rooster.  It’s his signal to let Dracula know that it’s time to come home.  Dracula is so in love with Cindy that he sometimes forgets to keep track of time.  It’s a New York love story….

Love At First Sight is a comedy that essentially gets a lot of mileage out of a handful of jokes.  The main joke is the idea of George Hamilton, with his perpetual tan, playing Dracula and speaking with a Bela Lugosi-style accent.  Hamilton plays Dracula as being very confident and very smooth but also rather befuddled by 1979.  He’s a gentleman of the “old world” after all.  The other big joke is that Dracula is in New York, a city where no one is impressed by anything.  This is very much a “New Yorkers Will Be Rude To Anyone” movie, a genre that was very popular in the 70s.  Some films, like Taxi Driver, used the rudeness of New York as a metaphor for paranoia and detachment.  Love At First Bite uses it for laughs.

(For the record, my favorite “New Yorkers Will Be Rude To Anyone” movie is the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.  Also, the last time I briefly visited New York, everyone was very nice and polite to me.  Only once did someone yell, “Look out, lady!” and I’m still not really sure what I was supposed to be looking out for.)

There’s a lot to like about Love At First Sight.  Susan Saint James and George Hamilton don’t exactly have a ton of chemistry but Hamilton himself is fun to watch.  “Children of the night — shut up!” he yells at the wolves and it’s hard not to smile.  It’s just so goofy.  Hamilton and Arte Johnson are a good comedic team and, for that matter, so are Richard Benjamin and Dick Shawn.  It’s a film of set pieces.  Dracula and Renfield rob a blood bank.  Jeffrey confronts Dracula at dinner.  Dracula pops out of his coffin at a church.  Some of the set pieces work better than others and this is very much a film of its time but overall, it’s a genial and amusing send-up of the vampire genre.

And it features Dracula at a disco!  It’s a 70s movie and it stars George Hamilton so it’s not really surprising that the action moves to a disco.  Still, if you can’t appreciate the sight of a caped Dracula showing off his best moves, I don’t know what to tell you.

Love At First Sight is a reminder that not every Halloween movie has to be terrifying.  Some of them can just make you laugh.