Love at First Bite is fine - It's a fun story and probably a fun film, a madcap 70s comedy focused on wacky misunderstandings and excess in New York. It has that very effective kind of comic writing where the jokes come thick and fast enough that you will find yourself quoting it for a long time into the future, an effect likely distilled by the presentation here, even as its treatment of race, gender, homosexuality - Most things - make you cringe.

But we're not here to talk about the story of Love at First Bite - We're here for the experience of the Fotonovel, and wow, this is a weird artefact! "The inevitable companion to the silver screen" it calls itself with what now feels like a desperate confidence, staring bravely into a future in which it will always be impossible to own your favourite films to watch at home - And it does admittedly feel like a bit of a shame that, for example, film novelisations are still going strong when fotonovels have been left by the wayside, and that may be in large part due to this being, on sober analysis, a bad format for storytelling. The approach borrows from comics, with blocks of text acting like speech bubbles on screencaps from the film, all printed on pretty high-quality glossy paper. The problem is that the film shots weren't composed to accommodate text - Why would they be? - So the reader is often left trying to piece together the right order of speech chunks, and/or straining to read the text itself. But... There's something so deeply endearing about the attempt, something which evokes trying to tell a film's story from snapshots and memories. It's a bad medium for storytelling, but I am so, so glad they tried!

And I am also glad that these things are still hanging around, waiting to be discovered like the bizarre little curios they are.