Horrorfest 2015: Cravenfest - Deadly Friend

Now back to big(ger) budget flicks with 1986's DEADLY FRIEND. This one I have a little history with. I remember catching a little bit of it when I was at my grandma's house as a kid. She had cable and my family didn't so whenever we visited it was time to catch up on all the pop culture I'd missed (mostly Nickelodeon and MTV). I was happily flipping channels when I suddenly came upon a young Kristy Swanson throwing a basketball at an old woman so hard that the old woman's head exploded in a fountain of gore. Needless to say, I was scarred for life.

DEADLY FRIEND stars Matthew Laborteaux as a young genius moving to a small town for a university scholarship. He's built an artificially intelligent robot called BB (voice of Charles Fleischer). BB's kind of a cross between R2-D2, Johnny 5 and Pauly's robot from ROCKY IV. But we get early glimpses that BB might have a mean streak. A well intentioned one (he chokes out thieves and nut punches bullies) but mean nevertheless.

Laborteaux starts a tentative romance with the beautiful girl next door (the afore mentioned Kristy Swanson) who is dealing with an alcoholic and abusive father (Richard Marcus). Other shitty adults in their lives include the mean old woman who lives across the street (Anne Ramsey) and both steals kids' basketballs and eventually blows BB up with a shotgun for trespassing.

Swanson also ends up dead at the hands of her father, and faced with the loss of his two closest friends, Laborteaux recruits the local paper boy (Michael Sharrett) to help him carry out a desperate plan: augment Swanson's dead brain with BB's microchip brain and bring her back to life!

Swanson/BB ends up going on a kill crazy rampage to exact revenge for all the wrongs she/he suffered in his/her life, which is where the basketball and the old woman's exploding head comes in. Laborteaux is left trying to cover this shit up.

So, it's an interesting premise, and for the most part Craven carries it out pretty well. The suburban setting is nice, the actors are all great (Swanson's especially surprisingly good in robot mode), the robot design is good. The only problem is tone, and reading about the movie's production makes it clear this is an issue with unwanted studio intervention. This is the only time I've ever heard of a studio demanding MORE gore. Apparently Craven wanted to make a PG-rated flick, a dark kids' story about a boy, his robot, and his dead girl, and the studio wanted a Wes Craven flick. So, they tried to strike a balance, and it comes off super weird.

Even forced into this situation, there is one element that I think could have gone a long way towards clearing up some of the movies problems: just get rid of BB's voice. It's a cute voice for a kids' movie, but not for this one. If the robot was just silent, the movie would be a lot more scary.