Deadly Friend (1986) Review

Deadly Friend is a film whose reputation has curiously hinged on one gloriously absurd moment rather than the melancholy sci-fi romance Craven and writer Bruce Joel Rubin actually set out to make. Approaching it today, restored in crisp high definition and with decades of hindsight softening its sharper disappointments, the film becomes a fascinating snapshot of studio interference steering a filmmaker away from his instincts.

In 1986, audiences expected another ride into nightmare. Craven had just reinvented the genre with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and anticipation for his follow-up was understandably feverish. But Craven wanted to shift gears. Rubin’s adaptation of Diana Henstell’s novel Friend was designed as a tender, mournful fable about grief and obsession. This was a story about a lonely prodigy, Paul (Matthew Laborteaux), who prefers his homemade robot BB to most humans, and the shy girl next door, Samantha (original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kristy Swanson), whose life is defined by the brutality of her father. When tragedy strikes, Paul reaches for the only tool he trusts: science. The result is not resurrection but something tragic, uncanny and sad.

The problem was simple. The test audiences wanted carnage. The studio panicked. Craven found himself pushed into shooting gory inserts and nightmare sequences that mimic the iconography of Elm Street, including that notorious head-exploding set piece. What was originally pitched as a gothic love story suddenly juddered between tones until the final cut resembled two incompatible films welded together. You can see the tension in every other scene. Slow, sincere character beats butt up against lurid violence. Dream sequences intrude without organic purpose. The infamous final shock ending is so bizarrely at odds with the film surrounding it that it almost plays like parody.

And yet it would be unfair to dismiss Deadly Friend outright. Beneath the seams of the reshoots sits a far more interesting work. Swanson, in particular, is terrific. Her performance as Samantha shifts between innocence, fear and a jerky, robotic physicality that is strangely affecting. She is genuinely heartbreaking in the early scenes where she clings to any scrap of kindness, and quite unsettling when BB’s programming bleeds through her movements later on. Laborteaux fares less well, partly because his role is both overburdened with exposition and undercut by the structural chaos, but he retains a wide-eyed sincerity that helps anchor the stranger material.

Craven’s craft is evident too. He makes suburbia feel lived-in and warm before twisting it just gently enough to expose the lurking menace. The basement sequences have that familiar Craven claustrophobia, and the story’s themes of abusive authority and doomed youth echo through much of his later work. Even the doomed robot BB, voiced with cartoonish rasp, is oddly endearing. There is a charm to these elements, and when the film is allowed to sit still, you can feel the version Craven wanted to make.

The new Arrow Blu-Ray release only emphasises how sharply shot much of this is. The colours pop, grain sits naturally, and BB’s bright paint job looks wonderfully tactile. Even Charles Bernstein’s synth-heavy score, which veers from sweet to spooky, comes through with clarity on the mono track.

Deadly Friend will never be counted among Craven’s greats. It stumbles, strains credibility and trips over its own compromises. But it is a curious, sometimes compelling relic of a director trying to move in a new direction while being yanked backwards by the very reputation he earned. For the Craven faithful, that alone makes it worth revisiting.

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Deadly Friend trailer