‘His face was burned off…’
You’d imagine that Wes Craven’s follow-up to A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the most beloved horror films of all time, would be another horror classic, or at the very least, a film that people have heard of. Instead, he shat out Deadly Friend, a film that I didn’t even know was one of his until ‘Directed by Wes Craven’ popped up in the opening credits. In his defence, he envisoned Deadly Friend as a family-friendly robot fun time in the vein of Short Circuit before the studio interfered and demanded Craven add some grisly murders. Unsurprisingly, the resulting film is a bit of a mess…
Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux) reanimates his neighbour, Samantha (Kristy Swanson), after she is pushed down the stairs and killed by her abusive father (Richard Marcus). Unfortunately for Paul, the new robotic Samantha is extremely dangerous.
Deadly Friend is at least entertaining in a so-bad-it’s-good way, some of the death sequences are fun (one such scene where a woman’s head explodes like a watermelon is particularly satisfying), and Swanson is weirdly compelling as the robot girl, but this is a film that probably felt dated when it was released 40 years ago, and it certainly does now. Tonally all over the place and lacking tension, Deadly Friend finds Craven at his least imaginative. There is none of the ingenuity of his best work and the scares don’t really land either. I did enjoy Charles Bernstein’s hysterical score, but it’s not enough to save the film from obscurity.
While it never threatens to be as stupifyingly awful as Cursed, Craven’s nadir, Deadly Friend is undoubtedly one of the horror master’s least effective works. Skip it.
