Deadly Friend (1986).....will probably stand as the most misbegotten, star-crossed, neither fish-nor-fowl entry in scare-master Wes Craven's filmography.....
Craven, fresh off his "Nightmare On Elm Street" smash hit, wanted to stretch his directing range and make a more purely dramatic, character-driven teen love story.......
Warner Brothers, for whom he made "Deadly Friend", issued a firm "Uh uh".
After initial production, the Warner suits wanted 'Nightmare On Elm' Wes Craven instead of PG Wes Craven.....jump scares, splashy kill scenes with gallons of splashy gore splattered on the walls........
And so poor Craven, who'd already delivered a cut of the kinder, gentler film he'd envisioned, went back into re-shoot hell, inserting jump scares, 'Elm St'-like nightmare sequences and a whopper of a death scene...(in which professional cranky-crone actress Anne Ramsey has her head exploded by a high-speed basketball)
The results are jarring to watch, since the serene, relaxed suburbia sitcom scenes look like they're from a different movie altogether.......and periodically interrupted by the sudden insertion of the Warner-ordered, booga-booga hard R-rated stuff.
Amidst the wreckage of the film, we could sort of spot what Craven had in mind here......a 'Frankenstein' tale for teens, where a boy genius (Matthew Labyorteaux) uses his prowess in micro-chip engineering to re-animate the sweet girl-next-door (Kristy Swanson) after she's been murdered by her abusive father.
Given the demographic the story appeals to, "Deadly Friend" was meant to focus on the creator's infatuation with this new creation, only this time re-adjusted for hormonal teens.
Yes, the boy genius is sweet on his girl-next-door, but as expected, his tinkering goes horribly awry......and here's where the movie lurches into the Warner Brothers version .....Boy Genius's robo-crush staggers around zombie-like as she gorily wipes out her vicious dad and subjects that crabby old neighbor to a basketball beheading.
Since the film itself arrived as something of a stitched-together Frankenstein concoction, audiences hungry for fresh horror turned their noses up at it......though it survives today as an oddball cult item in the Craven canon.
We're thinking the cult status comes from the totally bonkers, non-sequitur final scene......a nutty idea imposed on Craven by the then WB head of production Mark Canton. We'll not spoil it here, since it's so insane, so 'you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it' loony, it may be the one and only reason any horror fan would bother to check out the movie at all.
But it's still a botched effort at best and a 1 star (*) one-time-only watch for horror completists......who might still regret the time they spent watching it.
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