A recurring, and inadvertent, theme has started to develop from the movies I’ve enjoyed the most this year, and that is: “I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate this if I’d seen it on release.” I’ve seen a lot of stuff that forces me to imagine myself in the 80s or early 90s, with my still-developing understanding of movies, and art in general for that matter, and wondering whether that version of me would have been able to understand how it works.
I’m certain, however, that I would not have been able to understand Deadly Friend as a teenager. Because I’m not sure I understand it as an adult.
The movie stars Matthew Labyorteaux as a teen (?) genius who’s an expert in robotics and AI, and who’s built a robot friend named BB. He and his mom have moved to a suburban house in a new town, because he’s gotten a full scholarship to a university to study (and occasionally, teach) brain surgery, a subject he’s also an expert in, somehow. He’s made discoveries that even his sponsors were incapable of.
His new next-door neighbor is Sam, played by Kristy Swanson, a friendly teenager living alone with her abusive, alcoholic father. Paul, Sam, BB, and their other friend Tom the newspaper delivery boy love to hang out and do teen stuff together, like shooting hoops, doing pranks on Halloween, and antagonizing the paranoid old woman across the street. But when Sam is killed in what her abusive father claims is an accident, Paul hatches a plan to save her by implanting BB’s electronic brain into her body.
Going in, I knew three things about this movie: the premise, that it’s by horror master Wes Craven, and there’s a scene involving a basketball that is a highlight. All of those things are true. And yet, the movie that exists is so different from the one that I’d been imagining that it feels like something that couldn’t exist even now, much less in 1986. A bafflingly unique new genre that consists solely of itself.
Incidentally: if you haven’t seen it, do not look through the images on imdb or online, since people just straight-up spoil all of the best moments.
What makes it so unique is that it is, undeniably, a horror comedy, but I can’t think of any other movie I’ve seen that commits so thoroughly to the bit. It plays like an opportunistic take on the Amblin Entertainment-style teen adventures that were so common in the 1980s, with every scene, every camera angle, every bit of background music, every performance, and every light-hearted gag a pitch-perfect approximation of that. But they all feel as if they’ve been filtered through the mind of a mad genius.
I have to wonder whether my “this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before” reaction is due to my age, my general inability to understand kayfabe like the younger generations do, my still-incomplete experience with horror movies, or a combination of the three. Does this read as nothing more than obvious comedy horror to people who didn’t grow up in the same popular entertainment environment as I did, and who may not appreciate that all the cheesy and corny stuff in Deadly Friend was just the way movies were back in the 1980s?
BB the robot1And occasionally, bizarrely, the zombie teen girl is voiced — a lot — by Charles Fleischer, doing the kinds of “cute” gurgles and muttering that he and Frank Welker built entire careers out of. BB’s artificial intelligence is so advanced that he doesn’t need to be programmed; he can just teach himself things like picking locks and grabbing the genitals of bullies. There is the requisite scene of our hero and his friends getting accosted by a gang of motorcycle-riding bad seeds, and you can tell that the head bully is bad news because he wears a dangling earring, and it’s one of the fundamentals of 80s Teen Movies when we see the bully get his comeuppance at the claws of a cute and plucky robot. The movie is full of scenes that play out like lighthearted “comedy” familiar to anyone who’d seen literally any piece of media made between 1980 and 1990.
But while the familiar Teen Whiz Kid story is playing out, we get gruesome close-ups of brain surgery like it’s a horror movie, and the dark story of Sam’s abuse that’s presented like a Very Special Episode of a sitcom or made-for-TV movie. While Paul and his friend Tom are rushing to the hospital to execute their dark plan to reanimate their dead friend, Tom is freaking out over Paul’s driving, and Paul dutifully hits every single trash can. Breakfast with Paul’s mom has the teens up to their wacky hijinx of figuring out how to slip a sedative into her coffee, and whew! her reaction on tasting it is just to say “I make a good cup of coffee!” Later, there’s a hilarious moment of misunderstanding when our teen hero thinks he’s accidentally used too strong a dose and killed his mother! Oh, Paul!
It did such a good job of transporting me back to the early 80s that I was almost immediately back in the mindset of my adolescent crush on Labyorteaux (and his brother Patrick), which was somehow more confusing and inexplicable to me than my crushes on Buck Rogers and Starbuck, because Little House on the Prairie wasn’t set in space. Shouldn’t I have been crushing on Kristy Swanson instead? Watching it now, it was odd seeing Labyorteaux, who was clearly an adult (he was 20 when this was released), playing a character that I assumed must be a teenager around 15. The movie seemed to be putting him in long-sleeve shirts to hide how hairy his arms were for an adolescent, until it eventually just gives up and shows him in his underwear.
To quote MST3K: “Really old teenagers from outer space!”
My own psychosexual confusion aside, Deadly Friend is confounding because it always feels like a jarring mismatch of tones, light and dark clumsily and shamelessly slammed together, but at the same time, it always feels exactly tonally appropriate for a movie from whatever bizarre alternate reality it comes from. In lesser hands, this could have turned into something like Zapped! or Weird Science, but with the comedy replaced with horror. Instead, it feels like someone making a completely straight-faced version of this story in the style of a light-hearted teen adventure, totally unaware of how dark and weird it is. And without even the slightest bit of concern over whether anyone in the audience knows that the filmmakers are in on the joke.
Or in fact, whether it’s even supposed to be a joke. The only hint of awareness I could pick up on was after Paul tells Tom about his plan, the camera cuts to the outside of the house and we hear Tom in voiceover yell “Are you out of your fucking mind?!” (And also, I guess, the basketball scene).
So when zombie Sam (you can tell she’s a zombie on account of all the eye makeup) and her new robot brain (you can tell she’s got a robot brain because she always holds her hands like BB’s pincers) go on a revenge murder spree, it doesn’t feel to me like comedy horror, because it doesn’t feel at all self aware. It just seems like this is what a perfectly normal movie would be like in some alternate bizarro-reality.
It’s a reality where of course a computer chip is enough to give a teen girl super-human strength, and where an overt parody of 80s movies like, say, Wet Hot American Summer seems even more desperate than it does in our reality to make certain the audience knows this is supposed to be funny.
Even the slyness of something like M3GAN feels more clumsy and overt. Deadly Friend has no trace of that movie’s satirical intent — I don’t think there’s any point behind it other than to be bafflingly awesome — but it does feel way ahead of its time in comparison. Neither BB nor Sam ever breaks into a heartfelt song, but you’ll also never catch anyone involved in this movie winking at the camera.
I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that Deadly Friend should be required viewing for anyone interested in cinema studies, if not quite making it an essential piece of the western canon of film history. Especially if you grew up during a period where the style of movie and TV storytelling this movie approximates is the only thing you ever had access to. I genuinely believe it’s the best Wes Craven movie I’ve seen, re-contextualizing the way that genre movies work in a way that makes Scream feel blunt and old-fashioned.
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