Deadly Friend (1986)

For today’s review I’m checking in on an 80’s Wes Craven movie that somehow never made it on to my screen until now. This is “Deadly Friend” from 1986. Sandwiched between two of Craven’s best movies 1984’s “Nightmare on Elm Street” and 1988’s “Serpent and the Rainbow” you’d think this was peak Craven, but Wes was never particularly consistent and this movie doesn’t have the best reputation. Then again neither did “Shocker” from 1989 and that is one of my top guilty pleasures (Most of which are in the Horror genre, naturally). So let’s see where this one lands.

BB Thing

The movie was written by Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost, Jacob’s Lader) and is based off the novel “Friend” by Diana Henstell. It Stars Kirsty Swanson (The future big screen “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”) as “Samantha”, a girl with an abuse drunk father and Matthew Labyorteaux as “Paul”, a boy genius that has just moved into the area.

The plot is more than a little far fetched since right at the start we are introduced to “BB”, a full AI robot that Paul seems to have just thrown together in his spare time. Of course being a horror we are introduced to it strangling a would be thief trying to steal from the family car, not realising the robot was in the back. As the family come back to the car, the robot lets the thief go, but clearly we are meant to know this AI was always dangerous.

Two Minds, One Rampage

Choking aside the first half of the movie has shades of your standard 80’s family movie. The robot reminds me a little of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit (But cheaper, which makes sense given it’s not a military construction), but with a very 80’s slasher movie set up where we are introduced to a string of obnoxious characters that we all know won’t be making it to the end of the movie. None of this is bad though, just a little bit quirky and if you grew up in the 80’s likely a little nostalgic.

The second half of the movie is more of a mixed bag. Following BB’s demise at the hands of a shotgun totting grumpy old woman and Samantha’s at the hands of her father, the pair are effectively merged into the titular “Deadly Friend”. Paul determined to save Samantha (Who is brain dead and about to have her life support cut off) comes up with a crazy idea to use the chip from BB to fix her brain (Likening it to a simpel pacemaker). This is clearly a bad idea, but Paul is a bit of a mad scientist, totally oblivious to the slightly psychotic nature of the AI he created.

Bad Makeup

The biggest problem here is that Kirsty Swanson with excessive black eye shadow and doing the zombie walk isn’t exactly terrifying. But I don’t blame her for that, the set up of being a basically a cyborg zombie doesn’t leave a lot you can do as an actor to be terrifying, it really is down to the make up job and directing and this is one of the laziest make up jobs in monster movie history. They could have ramped up the cyborg part a bit or alternatively not had her be a total zombie, so she can move quickly. But we got what we got. The two main revenge scenes are actually pretty good, though one plays more seriously and the other just made me laugh out loud for the cartoon gore (Spoiler: This features a full on head explosion).

Ultimately the movie feels very confused, like it was trying to be a bit of everything and as a result didn’t really achieve anything of note. Despite a few good scenes and an interesting concept, the movie ultimately just doesn’t work. This narrowly scrapes a 5.5/10, not terrible but definitely one of Wes Craven’s weakest.