Deadly Friend

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	1986
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Wes Craven
Genre:	Dated weirdness
Starring:	Matthew Labyorteaux, Kristy Swanson
Rating:	3/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090917/
Tagline:	Grab A Friend before someone in the audience grabs you!
Favourite line:	"He's my father. Sometimes I want to roll a truck over his face but he's still my father."

Two years after A Nightmare on Elm Street, another horror offering from Wes Craven.

The plot:
Paul’s just moved into a new town. Nervous, he’s keen to meet new friends but, in the meantime, is happy to spend time with his self-commissioned robot, BB.
BB’s amazing, able to fully understand the English language, follow instructions and apparently think for itself.
It’s 1986.
When Paul befriends the pretty girl next door, Sam, they get into some hi-jinx, pulling a prank on the batty old woman down the road, who promptly fires a shotgun at BB, ‘killing’ him.
As luck would have it, Sam’s father is an incestuous, violent paedophile and, one night, when things get out of hand, Sam ends up knocked down the stairs, dying.
Now, what’s a man to do?
Of course!
Paul takes the microchip that gave BB the spark of life, and puts it into Sam’s corpse. What could possibly go wrong?

Daft as it gets, this is pretty low-brow stuff.
Clearly shot on a shoe-string, it falls into the ‘makes you laugh when it really shouldn’t’ category, primarily due to the fucking robot, which, though it demonstrates abilities robotics cannot manage even today, looks like something the Doctor Who artists rejected as ‘a bit silly.’
Acting wise, this is slightly above what might be expected for the type of movie, Craven able to drag at least half decent performances from those on set, which is commendable, given the material they were working with.
Honestly, there’s not enough plot here to fill a half hour Tales of the Unexpected, never mind a full length feature.
Mention must go to the presence of Anne Ramsey, best known as the batty old woman in The Goonies, here playing very much against type as the batty old woman down the road.
An odd tone, throughout, this comes across as quite childish, then Craven throws a moment of abject violence and gore at you, which confuses.
Mixed, then, and one for horror completists only, I suspect, I enjoyed this more than I probably should have.
Not sure if anyone else will, though.