1986
Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Bruce Joel Rubin (based on the novel Friend by Diana Henstell)
Since screening Deadly Friend last night, I have been wracking my brain trying to think of another movie that announced this loudly, this quickly in what ways it was going be bad, and how little it cared about you taking it seriously. Now, it manages to get past its first, establishing shot okay, as well as the second, as the latter is just about how a thief breaks into a van that, to his belated alarm, turns out to be occupied. I believe his process is all a single take, which means we maybe manage to get through the third shot of the film all right, by virtue of a sense of intrigue regarding that grasping metal arm, and whose point-of-view the next shot could be from, and why it's all hideously pixelated; but, with that pixelation effect, we're almost there. Maybe it's the fourth shot, then, maybe it's fifth or seventh, it doesn't really matter, it's certainly within the first ninety seconds: the thief is chased off by what turns out to be BB the Robot ("itself," that is, a creation of a mechanics shop, Robotics 21; Charles Fleischer provides the voice). BB, to be redundant, is a robot, of roughly human intelligence and frequently-surprising feats of free will, built as a science project by young Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux), a kid of around 16 who nonetheless has made significant strides towards his bachelor's degrees in electronics and biology if, in fact, he hasn't already moved on to his master's. He is, anyway, already holding classes himself, or at least giving lectures. All right, fine, boy genius—that's a parsable trope, at least—and so Paul and his single mom Jeannie (Anne Twomey) have just moved to their new, nice-looking-on-the-outside suburban neighborhood, and along with them they've brought this robot. The movie is both entirely about this robot, and not really meaningfully about this robot at all.
By the five or ten minute mark, we've spent a lot of time alongside Paul and BB as they go amblin' about their new neighborhood and meet their friends and their enemies, the former category filled out by the paperboy who defaults into being Paul's best pal, Tom Toomey (Michael Sharrett), and by the girl next door, Sam Pringle (Kristy Swanson). The thief was, at least, surprised, and while Tom falls off his bike when he sees BB, this is the very last time in the movie that anyone reacts believably to the prospect of a self-motive, superstrong, talking, banana-yellow robot monster tooling about the suburban streets of Middle America, as if this were in any way truly abnormal, rather than, at maximum, a slight novelty. To all appearances, Sam forgets the robot's even there by the third line in her meet-cute with Paul. It's like if they'd made a shitty, degraded TV show out of Short Circuit and we're watching the fifteenth episode of it, after the point that the writers had gotten tired of treating the marvel as anything but a quotidian feature of their scenario's reality. It's like some fever dream of a decadent late period episode of ALF where Alf is just openly flitting about town, and no one he encounters really responds to the fact that he's a puppet, because hey, Alf may be provocative, but they're not racists. Perhaps that's even the situation as it pertains in season four of ALF, I haven't gotten that far in the series yet, but I doubt it. Deadly Friend is possibly also a comedy, but that doesn't really quite fit either: it's got humor, but by that five or ten minute mark it's firmly established that the register it's in is the wrong one, a brand of kid's adventure semi-naturalism—even leaning too far into that for a kid's adventure with much dialogue of a shaggy, "no shit" variety, such as Sam explaining her name is short for Samantha—rather than the reality-optional cartoon zaniness it feels like a Goddamn robot demands. However, this is Wes Craven's kid's adventure movie, and whether he originally wanted it to or not, it meets those expectations. So if you ever wanted to see Mama Fratelli from The Goonies' head explode—this is by an enormous margin the best part of the movie—then I might, hesitantly, forward Deadly Friend as worth watching.
But as for what Deadly Friend gets up to otherwise, let us return to Sam, living alone with her father Harry (Richard Marcus), her mother either dead or having abandoned them, and you can see why she might, since his entire activity appears to consist of either being drunk on the living room couch or beating (and possibly sexually molesting) Sam, in a manner that unfortunately also comes off rather funny, insofar he might as well introduce himself to the Conways—for, indeed, he practically does—as "your nextdoor neighbor, Harry Pringle the Child Abuser." Roughly half an hour of idling later, involving what still comes off like a nebulous amount of story time despite Craven's use of numerous calendar markers, two important things happen: BB annoys a neighbor (that's Mama Fratelli, Anne Ramsey) until she blows it away with a shotgun, and Harry throws his daughter down the stairs. She's taken to the teaching hospital at Paul's university, but things look grim, as a subdural hematoma is killing her. However, Paul, whose studies have encompassed advanced neurology and cybernetics, is convinced that he can save her using BB's salvaged CPU, jerry-rigged to interface with a human brain and allow Sam's functions to circumvent the damaged parts of hers. To this end, he enlists Tom's help to snatch her body before they turn off her life-support, and this corpse heist on a ticking clock is the very closest we get to a true and unironically effective scene, though it's still sort of "a problem," in that the early termination of Sam's life processes badly muddles whether what happens later actually invalidates Paul's hypothesis. Paul does successfully revive Sam, but either thanks to a weakness of his science, or perhaps just due to too much brain damage following her circulatory death, she's all fucked up, and she's also probably BB the Robot rather than Sam the Human. Yet as both BB and Sam have unfinished business, the mute composite creature is about to go kill-crazy.
Even so, not that kill-crazy, which means, for one thing, that the utterly shambolic back half of the movie—leaving any other objections aside—winds up being an unaccountably draggy affair, largely involving Sam wandering around, very occasionally wreaking carnage, and Paul re-hiding her in various unfrequented spots on his mother's property. Regardless, this is where the "it's Wes Craven's kid's adventure film" really comes into play, but not on purpose. Craven's ambitions with Deadly Friend had been to just make a perfectly nice (if glintily-edged) PG-rated entry into that genre, revolving around a teen super-genius and his Orphic teen romance—even more Izanagic, thus making Craven a real Makoto Shinkai before his time—only for Warner Bros. to shove him roughly back into his horror pigeonhole following negative test screenings attended, so the story goes, exclusively by A Nightmare On Elm Street fans. I have grave doubts that Craven's original cut—it may have been a virtually finished film at this point—was ever a good movie either (it is also hard to believe that Mr. Pringle's death was not already a factor, since otherwise what would the story even be; but I also haven't read the source novel which is, suggestively, only titled Friend). But the studio had to do something, and reorienting the story so hard that it landed in another genre via extensive reshoots of violence and gore was, it's true, "something."
Craven was hugely disinvested in this, but, oddly or not, that disinvestment shows in the structure of the movie we have more than in his filmmaking, so whether his skillset betrayed his intentions or he just wasn't very good at other things, it's positively the case that nearly every horror-fied reshoot is better than anything that isn't. So it's very noticeable, structurally-speaking, that the movie is wasting its time with a pair of nightmare sequences (of Elm Street, if not on it), especially of Mr. Pringle's burned corpse slithering into bed with a horrified Paul. (That there is no scene of Robo-Sam slithering into bed with a horrified Paul is earnestly baffling, as this kind of pubescent horror should be the gimme.) But it is scary, and visually-interesting, whereas the scene that the film is best-remembered for—that its entire legacy is bound up in—is, of course, that bravura sequence where Sam invades the old neighbor lady's home, reclaims a basketball confiscated by the irascible woman months earlier, toys with her briefly, and finally throws that basketball so hard at her face that her head bursts open. (We're not quite at the "other objections" part yet, but yes, "Robo-Sam has inexplicable super-strength" is at least on that list.)
Before the MPAA got ahold of it, it was apparently even grosser and more horrible, but even as-is it makes me all the more annoyed at the sterilizing impulse Paramount's Friday the 13th series was following at exactly the same time when Craven was still getting away with this here and the Craven-adjacent Nightmare sequels were getting away with that over there. The film concludes with a gruesome summing up that is also, presumably, a nightmare sequence (following Sam's climactic second destruction, Paul goes out to steal her corpse yet again, but upon pulling her body out of the morgue cooler, the robot inside tears its way out of her flesh and kills him); it's probably the second-best scene in the movie despite, to my understanding, not being directed by Craven in any way. But anything with the kids just talking and having characterization? Forget about it. I pretty much already have. Okay, fine: Laborteaux, in any given shot (if never across the entire film and sometimes not across an entire scene), can at least come off like he's committing to a teen mad scientist overwhelmed by horror, grief, and his own perspiration, which is admirable given how little he has to actually attach that to. It's only not the final compliment I'm going to give the movie because I do want to spare a word for how very good Charles Bernstein's score is, an example of electronic horror film music characteristic of the 1980s and the one (mostly) effective part of the movie until, at last, during the closing credits, they have that fucking robot start beatboxing over it.
Such is the culmination of a movie that has persistently felt like a giant bunch of wrong turns, starting with having a fully-functional robot at all, and the aforementioned way society treats that robot with dryly absurd aloofness broken only by a certain nonplus when it's crushing their testicles in its vicelike grip (it continues in this wrong-turn spiral by insisting, despite the evidence of our ears, that the robot is adorable, and not deserving of its destruction, and that Fleischer's growly-chripy Gizmo-esque vocalizations are "cute" or "funny" and not "insipid" and "irritating"). I don't know if the 80s thought that Terminators were just on the horizon, or what.
The big wrong turn is probably just the involvement of authorities so early—you feel it more than you might immediately realize it, but "sworn death certificate" seals off a lot of narrative possibilities, and this kid's adventure movie is integrated into institutions like "teaching hospitals" and "the county coroner" far more than that genre would ever benefit from being—and this, along with the eradication of Sam's personality, means that doing anything varied with her new state is kind of impossible, just "hide in the shed, no, the attic" for most of an hour. It sends it down a path where it's hard to understand what Paul's endgame is ever supposed to be, or even that "having an endgame" has occurred to him, though while he has, undoubtedly, committed crimes and played God, he also has a revenant, and I think the superstructure this kid genius exists in would be way more interested in the revenant. It has the plot beats of a Frankenstein, with its forbidden science undertaken in secrecy, without the thematic import of a Frankenstein—Paul's options have already been narrowed down to only two, "fail and throw her body in a dumpster" and "succeed and reveal this miracle before the world," the instant she was declared dead anyway. So much of the movie feels false because, at some point, he was always going to have to go public, whereas the challenges of Sam's resurrection as it's taken shape militate towards doing that toot-sweet. This is, I suppose, unless he planned on keeping his dead girlfriend in his mom's attic forever, but not one solitary thing about the movie suggests that sort of sinister intent or that we ought to be reading this as some takedown of possessive masculinity, and it can't really even register as a fable of insane grief. (Even the addle-headed, plug-n-play luddism can't last the whole feature's length: right before her robo-rampage leads to her death, Sam's original personality resurfaces for the effect, only, of cheap tragedy.)
Now, you have to let a movie have its way, I know that, and Colin Trevorrow has already instructed us what a perilous proposition it would be to rewrite Deadly Friend even if we wanted to. So it's a bad movie, but if I have, as yet, only implied that it's a howler of a bad movie, let it be known there's a whole lot to howl at—from petty bullshit miscalibrated filmmaking, like Paul drugging his mom so he can execute his hospital mission with a pile of sedatives that comes amusingly close to making the powder appear of greater volume than the coffee, to more significant bullshit miscalibrated filmmaking, like BB's slow-motion, multiple-explosion "death" scene that would look exactly the same if Craven were intentionally courting your laughter, to the fact that even the "good" parts, like the curmudgeon's decapitation, come off only as abjectly fucking ridiculous thanks to being so incongruously set against all the poorly-done parts. (I am still not ruling out the possibility that Craven was making a comedy, just extremely intermittently and without the ability to properly communicate it.)
But the most consistently hilarious thing is the shocking misjudgment that Craven inflicts upon Swanson once Sam becomes a going concern again. For starters, there's just the transformation makeup itself, limited to smears of blue eyeshadow, more appropriate as a cosmetic choice for a lady hard rocker's music video, and so confusingly minimalist it's impossible to determine what it's supposed to literally represent. But then there's her actual performance, which, by the evidence of it surviving a single look at the dailies, is clearly what Craven wanted, and it is a transcendentally bad "stare and move stiffly" deal that would be pretty distractingly lousy for a background extra in any given zombie movie, and as frequently front-and-center as it is here, it's obviously unpersuasive as anything beyond an actress who knows damned well she looks preposterous, so she alternatively looks either deeply embarrassed or like she's about to break character and laugh at her own situation. Obviously, it never gets to pathos, and if maybe there's one or two shots where Craven uses her semi-effectively as an uncanny force in her stillness, this is canceled out on the occasions she has to move quickly and she just runs like a dork, rather than walking like a sketch comedy version of a 50s sci-fi robot (a robot who, ahem, moved on wheels). Maybe this all would be just middlingly bad, or at least not bad enough to elicit laughter every time, except Swanson is also endeavoring (and, dear me, frequently failing) to satisfy her instructions to hold her hands in an unbelievably stupid-looking and physically-untenable sideways Vulcan salute, so as to resemble BB's metal claws. It is incumbent on us now to observe that despite all of this, our boy genius Paul doesn't seem to ever figure out that the predominant personality in Sam's body is his blown-up robot (possibly because there's zero continuity of personality there, either), arguably not even once she starts screaming the robot's name, "BEE-BEE! BEE-BEE!", the cherry on top of Swanson's humiliation.
I am somewhat opposed, philosophically, to the concept of "the good bad movie," but Deadly Friend gets so extremely close that maybe it illustrates why that's my philosophy in the first place. This is not a laugh-a-minute good-bad time, and while it's a bunch of funky, junky wackiness that I would probably simply enjoy in a movie built to support it (cough), it is embedded, here, in the matrix of what's just a bad movie, full stop. Thus Swanson descends to world-class bad acting, but it's from a place of mere regular bad acting; a fair amount of this movie is just boring, so while I've used the word "personality" in this review, it's ill-advisedly, because Bruce Joel Rubin's screenplay provides very little of one to anybody but Paul and Paul's largely gets wiped away by the dull, repetitive events of the last half, with nowhere further to take him; and besides the studio-mandated kill sequences everything is always the flattest, soggiest version of itself, down to Craven's muted direction and Philip H. Lathrop's cinematography, so that if a studio movie shot on late-80s filmstock mostly in sunlight is rarely going to look truly terrible, this is still pointing in that direction, and it looks cheap even though by any standards, let alone Craven's (unbelievably, it was tenfold Nightmare's budget), it wasn't. I appreciate that it's at least idiosyncratically weird, but there's such a logy quality to its weirdness that, on balance, it's not really even fun.
Score: 3/10
Critics are raving about DEADLY FRIEND!:
ReplyDelete"Like some fever dream of a decadent late period episode of ALF"
---Hunter Allen, Kinemalogue
Yeah, but ALF is good!
DeleteI believe that's the idea ;)
DeleteMore substantive: I remember seeing this on TNT in the 90s and oh my god for a guy who had as much apparent talent as Wes Craven it's *amazing* how much garbage he made, and how much of it is because he was near broke for most of his career and how doing exploitation was the only way he could manage to get off the ground and how that stuck with him forever. Deadly Blessing is (yet) another one where you can tell the guy making it has potential despite the movie itself being kinda shitty.
I heard Craven mention somewhere how he got pretty close to getting the director's seat for Die Hard and WOW am I curious how that would've turned out.