DEADLY FRIEND. Film devastated by its producers

Deadly Friend is an example of a film devastated by its producers.

Single mother Jeannie Conway and her son, teenage computer genius Paul, move into a new suburban home. Paul earns a scholarship to a prestigious polytechnic and soon befriends his peers, local paperboy Tom and neighbor Samantha. They are often joined in their activities by BB – a robot built by Paul, endowed with superhuman strength and artificial intelligence. Although BB proves overprotective of his creator, he otherwise seems harmless. Still, he arouses unease among the locals and is ultimately destroyed by a shotgun blast from a spiteful, eccentric neighbor. To make matters worse, the budding romance between Paul and Samantha is continually sabotaged by her father, an abusive alcoholic. One night, in a fit of rage, he pushes Samantha down the stairs, and she dies from severe injuries. Paul decides to bring her back to life by implanting BB’s microchip in her.

Deadly Friend is an adaptation of Diana Henstell’s 1985 novel Friend. At first, the project was envisioned as a science-fiction thriller with a love story, a sort of dark variation on John Carpenter’s Starman (1984) – at least that’s how director Wes Craven and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin imagined it. But test screenings, attended largely by Craven’s horror fans, went disastrously: audiences complained about the film’s gentle tone and lack of gore. Warner Bros. executives therefore demanded radical rewrites and reshoots: less romance and character development, more violence, blood, and macabre imagery in the style of Craven’s previous box office hit, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Mark Canton, then president of Warner, forced Rubin to write additional scenes with a heavy dose of brutality. Canton was also the mastermind behind the absurd final sequence.

Ironically, when the filmmakers delivered a cut that followed these producer-mandated guidelines, it turned out to be too graphic to earn the desired MPAA rating (R instead of X). Censors stepped in, and Deadly Friend once again fell victim to edits and other post-production changes – the thirteenth version of the film was finally approved! Producers even meddled with the title: the original Friend, identical to Henstell’s novel, was rejected as unappealing, as were A.I. and Artificial Intelligence. The final choice was Deadly Friend. None of this helped – when the film hit American theaters in October 1986, it flopped financially and received negative reviews. Unsurprisingly, both Craven and Rubin disowned Deadly Friend. An “uncut” version was released on DVD in 2007, though it still strayed far from the creators’ original vision.

In the end, Deadly Friend became one of countless films ruined by Hollywood executives (similar fates befell Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate [1980], Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America [1984], and Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses [2000]). Its premise is unconvincing, and its development is utterly botched. In short, nothing holds together – instead, everything reeks. The film resembles a clumsy mashup of Frankenstein and John Badham’s Short Circuit (1986), spiced with idiotic plot devices, pathetic dialogue, mindless gore, and an absurd twist ending that hammers the final nail into the coffin of this chaotic production. This is all the more frustrating once you know what the film might have looked like before the producers got their hands on it. And it is them – not Craven and Rubin – who should be blamed for the final shape of Deadly Friend.