November 13, 2014 - 5:44am by Adam Dravian
Deadly Friend, directed by horror icon Wes Craven, is a really fucking weird movie.
Warning: Lots of spoilers ahead.
It's about a teen genius who moves to a new neighborhood with his mom and his silly yellow robot, BB.
Teen Genius soon discovers that he has the good fortune to live next door to the busty chick who played Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the original movie (who was only 16 at the time this was filmed).
Pretty rad so far, right? Wait, here comes a couple bummers. Buffy's dad's is a creepy and abusive overprotective drunk.
And another of Teen Genius's neighbors happens to be the bitchy old lady that headed the crime family in The Goonies.
But things are mostly good. Teen Genius befriends a local paperboy, starts a bit of a romance with Buffy, and of course they all have a shitload of fun with that lovable robot, BB!
They play basketball with BB (actually, they play basketball around BB while he just kind of swivels a bit, but whatever). BB protects Teen Genius from the local bullies.
They even go trick or treating with BB on Halloween. Oh, and BB talks with this silly little muttering voice that's like a mix between a gremlin and a ... I dunno, some kind of fucking robot.
Now, at this point the movie totally feels like a PG-rated teen drama. Kind of similar in tone to some of the made-for-TV live action movies Disney made in the '80s, like Not Quiet Human.
And then the tone shifts. Big time.
The "lovable" BB is destroyed by the shotgun-toting robot-hating Goonies Granny. Teen Genius gets depressed. Then Buffy's drunk daddy accidentally murders her, and Teen Genius gets even more depressed. And a little bit insane. He convinces Paperboy to help him steal Buffy's corpse, and then Teen Genius shoves BB's salvaged CPU into Buffy's dead brain. Somehow, this actually works. Buffy is revived from the dead, although she's now mute, wears a bunch of grey eye makeup, moves by doing the robot, and basically behaves like BB did.
Oh, except she brutally murders people. Teen Genius tries to keep Robo-Zombie Buffy hidden away in his attic, but she keeps getting out and ghost-making. She snaps her dad's neck and tosses him in a furnace. And, in what may be one of the most absurd and amazing death sequences in any movie I've ever seen, she explodes Goonies Granny's head by throwing a basketball at it.
This of course leads to the tragic climax where Robo-Zombie Buffy is being hunted by the cops, but just before she's shot down, she seems to regain her lost humanity and calls out Teen Genius's name.
And then we're treated to one of the most fucked up and nonsensical endings of all time.
Get this. Buffy's body is placed on a morgue slab and the morticians check out for the night. Teen Genius, apparently hankering for some more pseudo-necrophilia (okay, so the movie never makes it explicit that he fools around with his robo-zombie real doll, but come on, he totally did), sneaks into the morgue and stands over her dead body. He seems determined to revive her once again. However, her arms suddenly reach out and grasp his throat, choking him. Then the skin on her arms and face tears away, revealing that she has somehow grown a new fully-formed humanoid robot body underneath her human flesh. With mega-spooky teeth.
And with this shocking and mind-numbingly retarded revelation, the credits roll.
Oh, boy, these fucking credits.
As if that final scene wasn't a big enough fuck you to the audience, we're given a credit song that constantly has BB's stupid voice repeating its name, "BB ... BB ... BB ... BB," over and over again. The entire credits. Here, watch it and see how long you can endure the stupidity:
So why was this movie such a mess? It turns out there's actually an explanation.
It's based upon a book called Friend, which is a tragic and somewhat macabre teen romance. Wes Craven, hot off of directing the mega-successful A Nightmare on Elm Street, wanted to prove to the world he could make a movie that relied more on drama than scares and gore. Basically, he wanted to do the same thing John Carpenter had done with the '84 movie Starman. And that's what he did. The original cut of Deadly Friend was a PG-rated tragic teen drama, with an emphasis on the macabre relationship between Teen Genius and Robo-Zombie Buffy.
But then they screened the movie to a theater full of Wes Craven fans who were expecting another gory horror film and totally weren't into what they got instead. So the studio executives had Wes Craven re-shoot a bunch of scenes, adding in over-the-top violence and gore, and even some creepy dream sequences to toss a bone to all the A Nightmare on Elm Street fans.
The final scene in the morgue where the metamorphosed evil BB busts forth from Buffy's dead flesh-cocoon to strangle the one person it loves was the brilliant idea of the head of the studio. Apparently, everyone else involved in the movie knew it was a completely idiotic idea, but no one had to balls to tell him that, so they went ahead and made it.
So the final movie ended up being this tonally ADD cinematic Frankenstein's monster that bombed at the box office. The real tragedy is that critics at the time tore into Wes Craven for trying to make the movie be too many things at once. Not surprisingly, Wes Craven has since disowned the film.
Ninja Factor: Nope.
Satan Factor: I suppose the inferred necrophilia is pretty satanic.
Boob Factor: No nudity, but a bit of eye candy in the form of a hot 16-year-old with a nice rack. But she wears some truly awful outfits.
Obnoxious Credit Song Factor: Ugh. Way too high.
Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 pentastars. It's a clusterfuck of a movie, but an entertaining one. The basketball kill alone earns it an extra pentastar.