Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend is one of those strange cinematic hybrids that could only have been born in the 1980s.I liked it, I literally have the T-shirt, and at one time treasured an ex-rental VHS.
Hot off the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven was an established name still testing where to go next. Scream was years away, Swamp Thing had already shown his lighter comic-book side, and in between he took a Disney gig and experimented with a tale that was originally more Short Circuit than slasher. What arrived on screens, however, was a Frankenstein’s monster in more ways than one.
The screenplay was written by Bruce Joel Rubin (who would later pen Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder) and adapted from Diana Henstell’s novel Friend. The story follows Paul, a young robotics genius who has built a clunky but oddly charming robot named BB. Moving to a new town, he befriends the girl next door, Samantha. When tragedy strikes and Sam is killed by her abusive father, Paul refuses to let her go and implants BB’s circuitry into her brain. The result is equal parts tragic romance, suburban melodrama, and unhinged gore.
What makes Deadly Friend fascinating is its complete tonal schizophrenia. Craven originally set out to make a PG-rated, touching sci-fi love story, and much of that survives in the early acts—the warm teenage friendship, BB’s playful charm, even a hint of Spielbergian suburbia captured by cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop. Studio test screenings, however, brought it crashing down. Audiences expecting another Freddy were bored, and Warner Bros. panicked. They demanded blood, ordering reshoots that added grisly death scenes and horror dream imagery. Editor Michael Eliot must have had a lot on his plate. The most infamous of these is, of course, the basketball-to-the-face moment, where poor Elvira Parker (Anne Ramsey of The Goonies fame) gets her head blown apart in a single absurd, unforgettable shot. Kristy Swanson has recalled throwing that prop ball over a hundred times to get the right take, and the fake head was packed with real cow brains from the butcher to give it an extra meaty splatter. It’s grotesque, ridiculous, and unforgettable—exactly the kind of over-the-top practical gag that cements a film’s cult legacy.
Swanson herself is terrific here, years before Buffy the Vampire Slayer or her Playboy spread, when nobody cared what your political position was. Even at this early stage she commands the screen, switching between vulnerability and robotic menace with surprising skill. Laborteaux brings a sympathetic awkwardness to Paul, while Michael Sharrett as his buddy Tom even earned a Young Artist Award nomination. And then there’s BB, a beefier yellow Short Circuit’s Johnny-5—the $20,000 robot prop, built with Corvette antennae, camera lenses, and heavy hydraulics, capable of lifting 750 pounds. It’s a real character in its own right: clunky, mechanical, and strangely endearing—pure 80s tech nostalgia.
One element that deserves mention is Charles Bernstein’s score. Bernstein, who had already created the iconic music for A Nightmare on Elm Street, delivers something more playful and synth-driven here. At times it has the warm, almost whimsical tone of a family film, underscoring the PG story Craven wanted to tell, and then it jars against the gorier sequences when the studio-mandated horror kicks in. It’s another reminder of the film’s split identity, but it’s also what makes it such an evocative time capsule of mid-80s genre cinema.
The film’s flaws, though, are hard to ignore. It failed to land with critics and grossed under $9 million against an $11 million budget. More than that, Craven and Rubin publicly distanced themselves from the hacked-up release. Like Craven’s later Cursed, Deadly Friend was reshaped behind the scenes into something its creators barely recognised. It was never the heartfelt sci-fi story they wanted to tell, nor the straight horror the studio insisted on, but a compromised halfway house that satisfied nobody at the time.
And yet, watching it now, it’s oddly compelling. The tonal shifts, instead of ruining it, make it a curiosity. It’s a perfect 80s time capsule: neon-lit labs, synth score, practical robotics, outlandish gore, and suburban dream imagery that feels like VHS twilight. Impossible to finance today, it exists as a singular misfire with its own cult heartbeat. Not Last House, not The Hills Have Eyes, not Elm Street, not Scream, not even Swamp Thing—but its own stitched-up, half-dead, half-alive thing.
The ‘80s were saturated with sci-fi horror and robo-chillers—Chopping Mall, RoboCop, The Vindicator, The Wraith, even the hilariously amped-up back from dead Frankenhooker, and Re-Animator—a perfect storm for a Frankenstein-meets-technology narrative like Deadly Friend. Craven’s film fits snugly into that era, a Frankensteinian romance mashed with robotic kitsch. The kind of film that still gets talked about decades later because of its weirdness, because of that basketball kill, because it simply shouldn’t exist the way it does. A fascinating monster of a movie, flawed and messy but never forgettable.
For fans of 80s horror and sci-fi curios, Deadly Friend is a time capsule worth cracking open. The robot may be clunky, the kills absurd, but the mix of heart and horror makes it an irresistible VHS relic.
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