Deadly Friend

DEADLY FRIEND

[A shorter draft of this review appeared here in August of 2010.]

A dark and subversive take on the “people with their own sentient robots” type of film (like Short Circuit), 1986’s Deadly Friend (directed by Wes Craven) includes some wildly entertaining moments. You just have to exert tremendous effort to suspend your disbelief.

The story follows Paul Conway, a young whiz kid who studies the human brain and has built an intelligent robot named BB. Paul and his mom (with BB) move to a new neighborhood, where Paul swiftly befriends the local paper boy (a high school sophomore named Tom) and the cute girl next door (Sam, who has an abusive and controlling father). One night Sam’s father knocks Sam down a flight of stairs. She hits her head at the bottom and goes brain-dead. Doctors intend to remove her from life support after twenty-four hours pass. Paul goes all Frankenstein and concocts a plan to insert a small computer (which he calls a pacemaker for the head) that he salvaged from BB (who earlier took three shotgun blasts from a paranoid neighbor) into her brain. With the help of Tom, he actually executes this scheme – with dire consequences. Cyborg Sam sets out to exact revenge on all those in the neighborhood who have wronged her, including her father and the mean old lady across the street (whose death scene, which involves a basketball, is one of the greatest ever filmed). Paul’s efforts to control Sam mostly involve locking her in different places (like her old bedroom and the attic). Ultimately Paul’s mom and later the police come face-to-face with the new Sam, and a cop’s bullet ends the cyborg’s deadly rampage. A brief epilogue (added at the insistence of Mark Tapin, who at the time was the Warner Bros. alpha male) makes no sense unless interpreted as a nightmare.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (who also wrote Jacob’s Ladder) penned the screenplay for this project (based on a Diana Henstell novel that I've never read). Rubin originally set out to write “a deep and heartfelt movie” but explains that the studio demanded additional violence after an early cut of the film didn't go over well. “We showed the picture to a bunch of Wes's fans, who hated it. All they wanted was guts, so the studio told me to give them six more scenes, each bloodier than the last,” said Rubin (as quoted by John Wooley in his book Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares).

According to Brian J. Robb's book Screams & Nightmares, Craven had the following to say about Deadly Friend: “There were seven or eight producers, and they all had their idea of what the film should be... the film became a hodge-podge, then it was censored by the MPAA. They made us submit the film thirteen times.”

Though the material in the finished film sometimes veers into silly territory, Craven successfully constructed an engaging tale that evokes both chills and laughter despite the studio's meddling. You know you’re watching a unique story when at one point you realize that the protagonist has slipped his mother a mickey so that he can sneak out of the house to perform unauthorized experimental brain surgery on the gal from next door. The tale is only ninety minutes long and absolutely worth sitting through to get to that death-by-basketball scene. Deadly Friend isn’t a realistic yarn, but it’s damn entertaining.

Some critics enjoyed the film at the time of its release. In The New York Times, Caryn James described the movie as “a witty ghoul story” and said, “Mr. Craven deftly balances suspense and spoof.” Variety noted that Deadly Friend has “the requisite number of shocks to keep most hearts pounding through to the closing credits.” Other critics were less impressed. Paul Attanasio wrote in The Washington Post that the film “is a routine horror movie, poorly photographed (by old-time cinematographer Philip Lathrop) and poorly performed...” Time Out published this summary: “This may be Craven at his crummiest...”

If you don't expect high art or a yarn steeped in realism, check out Deadly Friend for a fabulous ninety-minute dose of raw entertainment. I rather enjoy this unusual over-the-top story.

Chiller

CHILLER

A made-for-television movie that was broadcast in May of 1985, Chiller (directed by Wes Craven from a script by J.D. Feigelson) has an intriguing core concept but isn't a terribly well-made project. If you seek it out, be aware that all extant home video versions at the time of this writing have extremely poor picture quality and seem to have been sourced from fourth or fifth generation tapes.

“Chiller was about a man frozen cryogenically ten years ago,” Wes Craven once said (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares). “He's now brought back to life entirely restored, except he has no soul. It's not horror in the sense of a maniac stalking people. Chiller was a kind of interesting thing.”

Chiller (which runs eighty-eight minutes including the end credits) suffers from a poor structure and the presence of a protagonist who is largely passive until her final confrontation with the antagonist. The tale opens with an apparent malfunction at a cryogenic storage facility that results in one frozen human subject (Miles Creighton) being rushed to a hospital. The protagonist (Marion Creighton, mother of Miles) waits around until twenty minutes into the story when a doctor proclaims, “He's alive.” Cut to six weeks later: Miles remains unresponsive on life support. Marion refuses to allow the medical professionals to pull the plug. At the twenty-seven minute mark, Miles finally opens his eyes. Three minutes later, Miles (in a wheelchair) arrives at his wealthy family's home (a sprawling estate) where his step-sister's beloved dog seems afraid of him. Six minutes later, unobserved, Miles snuffs out the pet's life – the first sign that Miles has not returned quite right. Miles goes back to work as an alpha male at his late father's corporation, where he berates the board of directors for giving money away: “Charity does not increase sales. It's non-profit.” Miles promptly fires his father's best friend Clarence (who ran the company while Miles was frozen) and then, emotionless, walks away from Clarence's corpse after the older man drops dead in a stairwell. Miles meets a female employee for drinks and engages in overt sexual harassment fifty-three minutes into the tale when he implies that he'll promote her if she sleeps with him. She inexplicably goes to his hotel room (later, we learn that he blackened her eye there). At the one hour mark, Marion's trusted ally (a Reverend named Felix) ponders, “When a man dies, what happens to his soul?” Six minutes later, Felix and Miles have a confrontation (in which Miles calls Felix a “meddling preacher”) that ends with the implication that the antagonist runs over Felix with his car. Felix survives and (in his hospital room) tells Marion, “The body you revived is empty. He has no soul.” The protagonist finally becomes active seventy-five minutes into the story when she interrupts Miles as he attempts to rape his step-sister. Four minutes later, Miles (with a gaffing hook in hand) stalks his mother through the house, and she locks him in a walk-in freezer. Police arrive and find Miles seemingly frozen to death, but he revives and attacks a cop. Marion shoots and kills Miles. An epilogue depicts a massive malfunction at the cryogenic facility, implying that the area will soon crawl with soulless citizens.

Walter Goodman accurately reviewed Chiller in The New York Times: “The show, written and produced by J. D. Feigelson and directed by Wes Craven as though they were following the commands of a computer, is a collection of scare tactics that ought to be frozen, wrapped in aluminum foil and placed in cryogenic chambers for at least a couple of generations. There are the rustlings and shufflings in the shadows, the creepy music, the free-floating mist, the camera moving ominously toward a victim, the sudden close-up appearances of the bad guy. With all of this, there's scarcely a chill in Chiller.”

One of the lesser projects in Craven's oeuvre, Chiller (with its protracted boring scenes and lack of an active hero) left me cold. Skip this one.

Deadly Blessing

DEADLY BLESSING

Directed by Wes Craven and released theatrically in the summer of 1981, Deadly Blessing follows a young woman named Martha who lives on a farm next to land owned by “the Hittites” (an Amish-like religious sect). Martha's husband Jim had been a Hittite but opted to disobey his father and leave the flock, thereby becoming shunned by his kin. Someone murders Jim fourteen minutes into the tale. Two of Martha's old friends (Vicky and Lana) arrive and stay with the widow to help her through her time of grief. Other nefarious events occur (a Hittite gets killed, someone unleashes a snake in Martha's bath, and Vicky's forbidden romance with another Hittite ends with her burned to death in her car), leaving the viewer to wonder who is behind this crime spree. “It's almost a traditional whodunit,” says Wes Craven (quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares).

“What we tried to do with Deadly Blessing was to kind of do something a little bit different... in that we were gonna combine a murder mystery with a horror film,” says co-writer Matthew Barr in a featurette titled 'So It Was Written' on the Blu-ray. Barr continues, “Deadly Blessing takes basically a group we modeled on the Amish, but we made them of course more extreme, and we called them the Hittites... and the idea was to kind of set up a story with a repressive religious cult.” Barr explains that the plot involves “a young man who had left the fold, married an outsider, wanted to farm and live the modern way... he gets killed... that's where the murder mystery came in.”

On the home video commentary track, Wes Craven describes his input into the screenplay: “I did a pretty thorough rewrite. The script was in need of a lot of work.” Later, he adds, “It was an early script for the guys [Glenn M. Benest & Matthew Barr], and it had a lot of problems, so there was a lot of just making things more believable and trying to figure out the logic of it. That went on throughout shooting, I think; there was always constant rewrites and trying to make it make a little bit more sense... Structurally, it had a lot of problems, so I was just trying to straighten out motivations...”

Co-writer Matthew Barr (on a Blu-ray featurette) notes that even before Craven became attached to the project, he and Glenn M. Benest “had written the script about six or seven times already. We made some versions that were more violent, less violent, as we tried to kind of refine the story. And ultimately Wes Craven was brought in, and then he wrote and rewrote the script himself a couple of times...”

Glenn M. Benest recalls that Craven “came up with one of the scariest moments in the whole film where there's a snake in the bathtub. That is a frightening scene, and he came up with that whole thing.”

In the book Screams & Nightmares, Craven describes the origin of the snake scene: “I dreamed the entire scene as it appears in the movie complete with fades, colors, everything. I woke up and wrote it all down, and we shot that version. It worked beautifully.”

The screenplay originally ended with protagonist Martha saying farewell to her friend Lana after the two survive a harrowing night. Producers tacked on an epilogue in which a demonic creature erupts out of the floor in Martha's home and pulls the protagonist down (perhaps to hell). “The end was added on... it was forced by the studio. That was shot back in Hollywood after the film was all cut together. The producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, decided it needed a big spectacular ending, and they had this thing written,” says Wes Craven (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares).

Co-writer Glenn M. Benest (in a video interview within the So It Was Written featurette on the Blu-ray) discusses the epilogue: “I'm pretty ambivalent about it because in a way it goes against what the film is about because to me the film is about that there isn't a devil or supernatural evil, that evil is in people. It's not out of some supernatural force... evil is what people do...”

Craven (on the home video's audio commentary track) recalls that the film wasn't well-received upon its release, but it did garner some praise. Carrie Rickey in The Village Voice called Deadly Blessing “a minor miracle: a consummately-crafted small genre movie with more ideas than most big movies...” Janet Maslin (in The New York Times) wrote that the project “is a better-than-average horror film, in large part because it isn't about terrified coeds being stalked by an ax-wielding loon. Its story is more original than that...”

More than three decades after its release, Deadly Blessing has become a cult classic. An odd film with a denouement (pre-epilogue) that only partially makes sense after repeat viewings, the project documents some beautiful landscapes and features a couple of particularly chilling set pieces (the notorious snake-in-the-bathtub bit and Lana's adventure while trapped in Martha's barn). “It's a flawed film in many ways,” Wes Craven laments toward the end of the Blu-ray's commentary track. I agree, but I also assert that the story is wholly unlike any other horror tale before or since, and for that alone Deadly Blessing is worthy of appraisal by genre fans.

Red Eye

RED EYE

“The interesting thing about Red Eye is it's not just a thriller. It is almost like a little art film,” opines director Wes Craven in a featurette titled A New Kind of Thriller that's available as a DVD bonus feature. “The entire second act is... basically two people on an airplane just talking... [screenwriter] Carl [Ellsworth] made it work with the dialogue.”

Indeed, this motion picture from 2005 (which was the first feature film credit for Ellsworth, who had previously written for television shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer) demonstrates that tension and clever banter can elevate a low-budget film to a quality worthy of acclaim. Critics sang the praises of the project during its theatrical run. In The New Yorker, David Denby called Red Eye “a dandy little thriller” that is “made with classical technique and bravura skill.” Ethan Alter (in Film Journal International) wrote that the movie “has a playful wit and enough genuine tension to make it worth your time and money.” Empire Magazine concludes that the film is “slick fun deftly handled by Craven.”

The director (in a video interview on the DVD's bonus features) describes how he became attached to the project. “Somebody called up and said, 'We have this script – first-time writer, but it's really good. Check it out,' and I was actually at the end of working a very long time on Cursed, the movie I did before Red Eye, and I was pretty much exhausted and burnt out, so, you know, 'I want to go to an island someplace and disappear for a year, but okay, I'll read it.' And it was just like, 'Oh, oh, oh, oh, juicy stuff.' And then it was like, 'Well, God I have to do this. I'd be a fool not to.'”

The bare-bones plot follows a hotel manager named Lisa who has booked a flight from Texas (where she attended her grandmother's funeral) back to Florida. At the airport, she meets a charming fellow who buys her a drink and chats her up. On the plane, Lisa finds herself sitting next to him and learns that his name is Jackson Rippner. Twenty minutes into the film (which runs a mere seventy-six minutes total before the end credits roll), the plane takes off. Just a few minutes into the second act, Rippner reveals his sinister side as his dialogue with Lisa skews darker and darker. Turns out he's part of a team hell-bent on assassinating a Homeland Security bigwig who is hours away from checking in at the hotel Lisa runs, and Rippner needs Lisa to phone her staff and move the target to a particular room so that Rippner's allies will have a clear shot at the suite with a surface-to-air missile. If Lisa does not cooperate, another one of Rippner's pals will murder Lisa's father.

I won't spoil much of the story except to say that in the third act, Rippner shows up at the home of Lisa's father, and a taut cat-and-mouse chase ensues. On the home video commentary track, Craven observes that in this sequence Rippner “was fighting her on her home territory for the first time. Suddenly he's on the other person's turf. Originally it was written for the father's house that he had moved into after a divorce that she had not grown up in, and we made it the house where she had grown up as a child, and so she knew every inch of it.”

My only complaint about Red Eye is that Lisa's dad ultimately shoots and kills Rippner about three minutes before the credits roll. I'd rather see the protagonist save herself at the climactic moment. This is a minor quibble, though, and Red Eye is otherwise an expertly-crafted yarn. Seek it out.

Summer of Fear (originally titled Stranger in Our House)

SUMMER OF FEAR (also known as STRANGER IN OUR HOUSE)

Based on a Lois Duncan novel that I've never read, the 1978 project Summer of Fear (directed by Wes Craven and originally broadcast by NBC under the title Stranger in our House) is a drama with supernatural elements rather than a horror film in the traditional sense, though the plot touches on assorted horrific notions: the death of loved ones via a car accident, the loss of a beloved family pet, and the effects of a stroke on one's ability to function.

In his book Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares, John Wooley quotes the director as saying that Summer of Fear was “where I first shot in thirty-five millimeter. It was the first time I ever used a dolly. I was working with things I never realized even existed.”

With its decent production values, the film showcases a teenaged Linda Blair as a young adult named Rachel who grows to suspect that her cousin Julia is a witch. Julia moves in with Rachel and her family after Julia's parents and housekeeper die in a car crash. Turns out that “Julia” is an imposter named Sarah who practices black magic and was the real housekeeper for Rachel's late aunt and uncle; the actual Julia also perished in the car wreck. For some reason, Sarah is hell-bent on making life uncomfortable for Rachel and her family. After Sarah declares her intent to kill Rachel and her mother, Sarah pursues Rachel and her ex-boyfriend in a car chase that ends in the witch's apparent death (an epilogue reveals that she survived).

I first watched Summer of Fear on DVD in 2009 and at the time was not impressed: I wrote, “This film is flat-out boring and riddled with flaws. Sarah's motive is unclear, the characters are dull, and the plot plods along with periodic incidents (Rachel gets a bad case of hives, for one) that the protagonist attributes to her alleged cousin's use of witchcraft. Don't waste your time.” Having just sat through the project two more times (once while listening to the DVD's commentary track), I now see the appeal of this tension-filled thriller. In addition to being a time capsule that documents the hairstyles, wardrobes, bulky telephones, and gas-guzzling automobiles of the late 1970s, the movie plays to the universal fear of one's family life unraveling. On the audio commentary, Wes Craven notes that “this is every teenager's nightmare situation: you have everything worked out in your family and with your boyfriend and everything else, and then somebody comes in and starts gaining all the power away from you.”

One of the film's more unsettling aspects is its overtones of incestuous relationships. Rachel's older brother seems attracted to his cousin. “Julia” gives her alleged uncle a neck massage and later (eighty-five minutes into the tale) invites him to “unzip me” as she changes clothes. Julia/Sarah claims that Rachel's ex-boyfriend always saw Rachel as more of a “sister” even when they were dating. These moments make me squirm in the present day and must have been exponentially more controversial back in 1978.

Though hardcore horror fans may not enjoy this entry in Craven's oeuvre, Summer of Fear has its share of entertaining moments and is worth at least one viewing for Wes Craven completists. If you go in expecting straight horror action, you'll be disappointed. The script (adapted from the Duncan novel by Max A. Keller and Glenn M. Benest) is relatively tame given that it was developed for network television, but it pushes the envelope in places and sports one particularly gut-wrenching scene (in which Rachel's beloved horse dies just before the midpoint). Summer of Fear is an atypical Wes Craven project. If you have one hundred minutes to spare and want a glimpse of a nuclear family's trials and tribulations in late-seventies California, check it out. It's a surprise-filled ride.

Night Visions

NIGHT VISIONS

A 1990 made-for-TV movie that Wes Craven directed and co-wrote, Night Visions follows a singular and memorable protagonist (a young woman named Sally Powers who has a history of mental illness, low-grade telepathy, and a fresh doctorate in psychology). In Los Angeles, Powers partners with a hot-tempered alcoholic cop (Tom Mackey) in an effort to solve a string of murders attributed to a serial killer nicknamed The Eagle due to his signature of leaving attractive female victims posed in spread-eagle positions. Peppered with periodic provocative and sometimes horrific imagery and sporting a well-staged tension-filled final ten minutes (and featuring a trippy dream sequence twenty-seven minutes into the story), Night Visions isn't nearly as unwatchable as most of the scant online reviews of this obscure project suggest. It was never destined to win any awards, but it's a perfectly serviceable thriller marred only by the unbelievable sub-plot of Powers developing a romantic relationship with a photographer named Martin (if Powers was truly obsessed with solving the case, she would not take time away from sifting evidence to go on leisurely dates) and by Mackey's habit of contaminating crime scenes.

Night Visions becomes increasingly interesting when a stressed Powers manifests symptoms of multiple personality disorder. Actress Loryn Locklin delivers nuanced performances in scenes that depict Powers slipping in and out of alternate personas. Other stars of note in this project include James Remar as Mackey and Mitch Pileggi as a police captain.

Seventy-one minutes into the tale, Powers articulates a thought-provoking profile of the killer that (along with a bone-headed move by the bad guy) ultimately leads to the discovery of his identity. I won't spoil the mystery. The Eagle is a unique antagonist with a penchant for snuffing out lives at carefully-selected geographic locations that form the points of a star when mapped out.

Night Visions at the time of this writing has not officially been issued on home video except long ago on VHS in some non-USA countries (PAL format rather than NTSC). Here's hoping the powers-that-be will sate Wes Craven's legion of fans by giving this decent little film a proper modern-day commercial release. I'd snap up a copy right away given the chance.

Night Visions doesn't rise to the quality of Craven's best work (it will never capture the popular imagination the way A Nightmare on Elm Street did), but it's above average for made-for-TV fare. Seek it out and let me know how you perceive it in the comments here on the blog.

My Soul to Take

MY SOUL TO TAKE

Written and directed by Wes Craven, My Soul to Take met with harsh reviews upon its theatrical release in October of 2010. In Variety, Dennis Harvey called the film a “dumb, derivative teen slasher movie” and “a pretty soporific affair bogged down by awkward expository dialogue, one-dimensional characters (or ones whose suggested hidden sides turn out to be mere tease), bland atmospherics and unmemorable action.” Gary Goldstein (in the L.A. Times) opined that the project is “a thrill-free snooze” with an “overly complex story.” Marc Savlov wrote in The Austin Chronicle that “this utterly mediocre forget-me-now could've been crafted by any faceless serial director.” I beg to differ with these three critics and all the others who dismissed My Soul to Take, which I perceive as a flawed but thought-provoking singular horror tale with ample scares and a core concept that demands repeat viewings to fully appreciate.

The movie opens with a gripping nine-minute prologue set sixteen years before the main story. In the opening sequence, a family man named Abel (who suffers from multiple personality disorder) finds a distinctive knife in his workshop and recognizes the weapon from TV news reports as the blade of choice used by a local serial killer (the Riverton Ripper). Fearing that one of his heretofore unknown personalities might be responsible for a string of murders, Abel phones his psychiatrist but then notices that his pregnant wife has already been knifed. Authorities arrive and shoot Abel as he's about to kill Leah (his three-year-old daughter). Abel snatches a gun from one officer, shoots him, and then offs his doctor before another cop takes him down. Wounded but alive, Abel revives in an ambulance en route to the hospital (where mysteriously seven premature births are happening) and causes a nasty crash (the vehicle flips, rolls, and ultimately explodes alongside a river). When help arrives, Abel's body is nowhere to be found.

Sixteen years later, the seven kids born the night of the prologue ring in their sixteenth birthday with a tradition known as “Ripper Night” alongside the river (by the remains of the ambulance, now rusted out and covered in candle stubs) during which one of the “Riverton Seven” must fend off a massive puppet designed to look as Abel might appear had he survived and lived in the wilderness all this time (ragged clothing, long hair, and a scraggly beard). Protagonist Adam “Bug” Hellerman (a sensitive fellow prone to migraines) is this year's “volunteer,” and he's spooked by the sight of the puppet. Before the ritual goes far, police arrive and order the teens to disperse. On his way home, Jay (one of the Riverton Seven) notices someone following him as he crosses an isolated bridge. Chased down by a long-haired bearded fellow in ragged clothes, Jay dies around seventeen minutes into the tale when his assailant slams his head against a metal post, knifes him, and tosses him into the river.

The next forty minutes of the film happen during daylight as the teens (unaware that one of their peers has been murdered) go about a typical day before, during, and after school. A female student nicknamed Fang holds sway over many friends and followers; she makes life hell for Bug and his best friend Alex, ordering a bully (Brandon) to rough them up. Thirty-three minutes into the film, Bug has a vision and sees (in a restroom mirror) Jay, bloody, swimming underwater. Six minutes later, Craven begs the viewer to wonder just what the hell is going on when Bug and Alex (alone in a corridor) begin speaking in unison and moving as if they are mirror images of one another for a minute or so. Just under ten minutes later, the present-day Ripper claims another victim and slits the throat of Penelope (a religious gal and one of the Riverton Seven) alongside the school's pool. Within eleven minutes, two more victims fall to the mysterious killer (who may or may not be Abel): Brandon and the young woman he lusted after (Brittany).

Night falls again one hour into the film, and the rest of the action plays out in and around Bug's home that evening. Craven reveals that “Fang” is Bug's sister and is in fact Leah (Abel's daughter), and the woman Bug thought was his mother turns out to be his aunt (paramedics cut Bug out of his dead mom's womb the night of the prologue). Eighty-one minutes into the story, the protagonist finds himself confronted by a cop who thinks that Bug's responsible for the four teens killed that day, and Bug finds that his aunt has also been killed. The Ripper shows up, kills the officer, and attacks Bug. I won't spoil the beat-by-beat moments of the denouement, but I will reveal the twist that confused many critics and may not be apparent until a second viewing: the night Abel died in the prologue, his seven personalities (each a unique soul) dispersed and reincarnated as the Riverton Seven, and one of them is the present-day killer. I won't tell you which one, though there are only three suspects left as the finale gets well and truly underway.

My only quibble with this film is that Alex (ninety-one minutes into the story) tells Bug that Abel developed “schizophrenia” at the age of sixteen. Schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities (contrary to popular opinion) and is a wholly different sort of mental illness.

“This was a script that got rewritten while we were shooting,” Wes Craven notes on the Blu-ray's audio commentary track. “It's a very complex story, and we kept figuring out how to make it better.” While some critics see the plot's complexity as a negative, I enjoyed watching a horror yarn in which not everything's spelled out even by the time one reaches the very end. My Soul to Take is a wrongly-maligned entry in Wes Craven's oeuvre, and I predict that it shall be rediscovered and reevaluated in due time. Thought-provoking, sometimes puzzling, but always entertaining, My Soul to Take is a unique spin on the “teens in jeopardy as a knife-wielding killer stalks them” sub-genre. Disagree? Leave some comments here on the blog.