“You didn’t say anything about a dead body. We were supposed to save her life!”

Anthony’s rating: It’s Popcorning Time!

Anthony’s review: It’s hard to convey what it was like to be a teenage film fan in the 1980s when looking at it from a contemporary perspective. As boring as it sounds to hear, you just HAD to be there. We’re talking about a decade where Chuck Norris was king, where we glorified a Stallone action film about ARM WRESTLING, where Superman threw the world’s nuclear arsenal into the sun, and where a stainless steel go-cart with gull wing doors was the coolest time machine ever to grace the screen.

We LOVED the heck out of mediocre movies in a non-ironic way, and in 1986 12-year-old me was so fully thrilled to finally be allowed to watch a Wes Craven movie I didn’t care if it was bad, I ate it up!

Craven had made his name with one of the most infamous indie horror thrillers of the ’70s (The Last House on the Left) then with one of the more iconic slashers of the ’80s in Freddy Krueger. By the second half of that decade, though, he wanted to try something different — something more philosophical, more dramatic, even grounded. So he made a movie about a teenage cyber-Frankenstein’s creature girl.

Yeah, I know, there’s a veritable deluge of Frankenstein adaptations and re-imaginings recently, yet sorry to say it’s always been a popular and fascinating topic to filmmakers. This one was more specifically involved computers, which in the mid-80s were still more fantasy than reality when it came to being depicted in TV shows and movies.

Based on a not-bad but somewhat forgettable book called “Friend” by Diana Henstell, this story follows teenage genius Paul, who always had a hard time getting friends so he made one, a robot named BB. Moving into a new town with his single mom, Paul does end up with friends in local paper boy Tom and girl-next-door Samantha, who lives with her drunk father. Things look good for Paul for a while, at least until a grumpy neighborhood lady shoots BB’s head off and Samantha’s dad pushes her down the stairs to her death.

Unable to accept losing his bot and his girl, Paul has the brilliant idea to combine the two, reanimating Samantha with BB’s brain chip. Predictably, things don’t go as planned and Doctor Von Musk quickly loses control of his increasingly vengeful and homicidal creature.

There is quite indelibly an interesting movie in there, but the director was visibly given a limiting budget and a set of instructions to move the film along from kill to scare without wasting much time — if any — on character development. Paul starts as a more sympathetic, less Myagi’d Daniel Larusso, but much too quickly turns into an obsessive mad scientist and becomes downright unlikable. Not that Doctor Frankenstein was ever the hero of his story, but still, he’s a geek like I used to be so I was rooting for him to get the girl, cyber implant or not.

In the end, the teenage part of the genius takes over, and that’s a bummer. The Terminatrix herself becomes much too psychotic to truly appreciate her acts of revenge, though don’t get me wrong, Anne Ramsey’s detestable old lady entirely deserved the slam dunk of death.

I always roll my eyes all the way back into my skull when the director or stars of a disastrous movie blame studio interference for changing the film they had signed on to make. But in this case, I do believe Craven when he later said that he had no initial intention to make a silly teenage gore fest but rather a social study into the trauma of growing up. But when Warner signed him for the film, they had in mind getting something more akin to Nightmare on Elm Street than a “modern” modern Prometheus. Part of the reason I don’t doubt it is that Craven obviously was aiming for a softer approach due to casting his teen lead with one of the Ingalls children from Little House on the Prairie (namely Matthew Labyortaux in one of his last live-action roles, as he mostly does voice over work now).

Playing his would-be girlfriend was a very young Kristy Swanson, before her short run of success as a go-to sexy blonde from the ’90s. Both do a commendable job as quite generic ’80s teens and honestly, I’ll give Matt a pass at every turn for being a fellow Autistic having made a name for himself in an unforgiving business. But still, his time as Albert Ingalls showed the kid had chops, and I would have loved to see him take the film originally envisioned by the director and his screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (the dude wrote the original Jacob’s Ladder, THAT’S how good his first draft must have been).

So the more cerebral film underlying in there somewhere became a by-the-numbers slasher like many of that era, but I was 12 and I enjoyed the crap out of it. I watched Deadly Friend again recently with my bestie, and I didn’t care that the man I am today wouldn’t care for such a movie if made today, I was completely awashed by nostalgia for a time when I did.

But most of all, I fully realized just how ignobly nonsensical, full-on “WHAT THE ACTUAL F**K” the “twist” ending was. Even if I didn’t care much about spoiling the basketball decapitation, I do think you should experience for yourself that studio-imposed conclusion to the film so I shall say not further of it. They were looking for shock value I’m guessing, and in a way they did succeed in making it memorable, just not in a good way.

If this review of mine does indeed incite you to check out the film, which I absolutely encourage, do so with the mindset of a kid form Stranger Things. It should have been good, instead it was poor but still enjoyable, and that’s alright by moi.