Deadly Friend

There is no reason to list the problems with Deadly Friend, when all of them can be traced to a singular root cause: studio interference. You don’t even have to know the backstory of this movie’s turbulent development to see that it a movie at war with itself in every frame. It is struggling to be something that it isn’t (a splattery, slasher-style horror) and fighting against what it is (a dark, twisted love story about what defines humanity), and neither side wins. Which is rather coincidental, given the movie’s plot. The movie is sort of a Frankenstein variant; a genius boy falls in love with his new neighbor. She dies in an accident. He revives her with his robotics and computer expertise, but she becomes something of a murderous robot. The studio got back bad test screening results and demanded the love story be toned down in favor of dream sequences to ape Nightmare On Elm Street, and gory kill scenes, along with an ending so monumentally stupid it defies explanation. I could feel the movie’s seams tearing every time it was forced to pivot from the emotional roller coaster of the misguided love story to the carnage. I could sense a smarter movie being ripped apart by the editing that sought to tighten up the pace at the expense of character development and a story arc. It’s a shame, because the remnants that are there of what Wes Craven was trying to do are good. Kristy Swanson does a great job as the human robot, and there’s seeds of romantic pathos sprinkled throughout. I really felt for the main character as he finds out his perfect solution to keep his girlfriend alive is having disastrous consequences, but he’s torn between his heart and his head. If that story had been allowed to happen, this could’ve been an intelligent, thought-provoking movie. But the shoehorning in of tropey horror elements puts a damper on the whole thing. The romantic plot never develops, the story lurches forward like a drunk staggering down a hill, and the gore is so over the top it feels like a Troma movie. I kept expecting the movie to embrace the camp, and it never does, but it never commits to the emotional core either. The best way to describe it is a scene from the movie. Swanson’s robot brain sees itself in the mirror and realizes it isn’t in a robot body anymore. It gets angry and sweeps things off a dresser. It is neither alive or dead, but it isn’t undead either. It’s a monstrosity, a hybrid of things jammed together that do not belong. It shouldn’t function, but it does, but incorrectly. That is Deadly Friend.