Movie Review: Deadly Friend (1986)

 

Wes Craven has a way of really messing with my head. I love the dude, but some of his less talked about movies often confound me when I get around to seeing them. Case in point: Deadly Friend. Just the synopsis for the film sounded a little out of the realm of what Mr. Craven is usually involved with. So then I had to wonder, what kind of Craven film was this going to be?

Teenager Paul is a genius who has built himself an artificial intelligence robot named BB. He and his mother move to a new town where Paul can continue his studies of robots and their connection to how the human brain works. He soon becomes friends with fellow teen Tom, and is immediately infatuated with his sweet but troubled next door neighbor Samantha. And when both BB and Sam meet with tragic fates, Paul uses his skills to save his friend - with deadly consequences.

I completely enjoyed Deadly Friend for what it was, even if at times I couldn't actually figure out what it was. Earlier scenes make the film look like a sweet story about a boy and his robot; then it becomes some whacky sci-fi/science-gone-wrong thing; then it's about a teenage robot-zombie girl on a murder spree. But the tone is all wrong, or at least wrong from what you think it would be. The film has a strange plot that should be easy to make fun of, but despite the fact that there are some funny moments, the tone of the film is not that comedic. Instead it is a pretty sad and heartbreaking movie that really takes itself seriously.

Kristy Swanson is a dear whom I will always love because she is and always will be the original Buffy Summers. And here in Deadly Friend she is surprisingly just as impressive, though at times her performance comes dangerously close to being way too campy. As the nice, beautiful girl with a depressing home life, her physical appearance and demeanor fit the character perfectly. She even has some nice touches of comedy in there that are so quick you might miss them. Swanson also does a wonderful job when she is in her zombie state, and this is where she could have made the most mistakes. Her unblinking eyes, and stiff movements are stereotypical of how one would think you would act if you were trying to be a robot but somehow Swanson makes it work - even the strange Spock-like way she holds her fingers to resemble BB's robot hands.

Deadly Friend arrived just two years after Craven did A Nightmare on Elm Street, and there are definitely parts where you can see the studio's influence on Craven to make Deadly Friend more "Nightmare-like." There are a few very odd dream sequences in the film, the first being one that Sam has about her father. He comes into her room at night, hovering over her bed (possibly implying some sort of sexual interest in her), and starts berating and almost hurting her, and Sam fights back by stabbing him with a broken vase. His body then proceeds to squirt a huge amount of blood all over poor Sam as she is screaming while getting ever more drenched - and the audience isn't sure if they should be amused or horrified.

Another dream sequence is quite clearly in reference to Nightmare on Elm Street. After Sam has killed... um, somebody (resisting spoilers is hard), Paul must dispose of the body. Later on that night, Paul dreams of a strange round object moving around under the covers. When he pulls back the blanket, the round thing is the burnt head of Sam's victim, and the body comes out of the mattress and is just about to attack Paul when he wakes up. The reference is obvious and fun for Nightmare fans, but I wonder how it played out for audiences who had just seen the first Nightmare only two years prior.

Of course, one cannot talk about Deadly Friend without mentioning the word "basketball." Watch the video below to find out why. And if you already know why, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't mind seeing it again:



That's definitely a movie moment where you have to either stop or rewind the flick because you're too busy almost dying with laughter. As a scene that comes completely out of left field from what we have so far come to expect in this movie, it is a more than welcome surprise - even if it doesn't particularly fit with the rest of the rather tame killings in the film. The fact the victim in question is the great Anne Ramsey also makes this a standout sequence.

One that that seemed wrong about the plot was how Paul made absolutely no attempt to hide or safeguard his new zombie friend. I thought right away that the most obvious place for her was in the attic, as the access was right there in Paul's bedroom, but for some stupid reason he doesn't do that, at least not right away. He first hides her in the garden shed, without locking the door or anything - a place where his mother could easily run into her and almost does. I thought this kid was some kind of genius or something?

I also didn't particularly care for the shock ending, even though it is left a little open to interpretation that this could be a dream sequence as well. The first ending was sad enough and brought the story to the right conclusion, so this shock ending was really not needed. All in all, I can't seem to help the fact that I really liked Deadly Friend. It walks a fine line between B-movie stupidity and a genuinely well-told tale, and I guess if anybody could pull that off, it would be my man Wes Craven.

Movie Review: The World's End (2013)

Ay yi yi. Are the holidays over yet? I need my regular boring life back.

Edgar Wright. Simon Pegg. Nick Frost. No joke, three of the greatest things to happen to movies in the last decade. Shaun of the Dead is beyond words brilliant as a rom-zom-com with blood, guts, belly laughs, and a lot of heart. Hot Fuzz was an immensely successful follow-up that ventured into the buddy-cop action movie genre, but still had the blood, guts, belly laughs, and possibly even more heart. And now the fan-coined "Cornetto Trilogy" concludes with the appropriately titled The World's End. The blood and guts are blue this time, but they're there, and so are the belly laughs and never-ending heart.

Five childhood friends return to their hometown to attempt to complete an epic pub crawl they began over 20 years ago - 12 pubs in one night, concluding at The World's End. As the boys rehash old times and deal with their issues, they realize that the town is not the same as they remember, and for good reason, too - most of the townspeople have been replaced by robots.

The boys surely haven't lost their touch in creating something that audiences will love, both newcomers and those already familiar with their work. Once again I was impressed by the writing and the delivery of the writing by all the actors. The jokes come at rapid-fire pace (and people make fun of me for always using subtitles) and the humor is smart, sometimes dirty, but always cleverly laid out in relation to what the movie is about and situations that come later. Watching the movie again lets you catch on to some references you missed before, the double meaning behind some of the lines ("We're here to get annihilated!" "It must be the network"). They did similar things in their previous two films, but it still works and it's still brilliant how they're able to pull it all together.

Pegg and Frost are of course great in their roles, especially since here they are sort of playing a reversal of their previous roles in both Shaun and Hot Fuzz. Pegg is the wild and goofy Gary King, spouting out more one-liners than I could keep up with, while Frost is the more professional, subdued Andy Knightley. Nobody plays best buddies better than dudes who are actually best buddies in real life. Truth be told, though, I kind of loved the actors playing the other three friends in the group - Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan - a bit more, as they were all completely adorable and hilarious. It was good to see all of them have their chance to shine, instead of the movie being all about Pegg and Frost (not that they would intentionally do that, but they are the stars of the show to the fans).

Looking at the movie for what it is on the surface, it works as a weird hybrid action-scifi-comedy-bromance thing but there is a message and a reasoning for what they did. I liked the whole thing at the end about how human beings have every right to be fuck-ups because I get it. Conformity makes you normal and safe, but making mistakes lets you learn, become wiser, and help others. There's also something there about conforming and making uniform all the charming small town pubs and stores and whatnot (as two of the pubs in the movie look exactly the same) which is also somewhat bothersome. How long until real mom-and-pop places just cease to exist? However you choose to look at it, The World's End is a very charming movie about the simple things in life - friendship, a good night out at the pub - and how important they are to people.

It almost feels wrong to heap so much praise on pretty much everything these guys do, but I really can't help it. I fucking love Shaun of the Dead, I really super-duper like Hot Fuzz, and now I'm all kinds of giddy over The World's End. Wright and Pegg probably aren't completely done making movies but I do wonder about what they are going to do next. Something totally different? More of the same but different actors or something? I don't know, but I do know that I will be right there to experience whatever they come up with.

Project Terrible: Robot Monster (1953)

I can't believe all the ridiculous problems I had trying to watch this movie that is only an hour long. But I finally watched Robot Monster, assigned to me for Project Terrible by Maynard Morrissey, and boy, was it completely not worth the wait at all. There is mild charm in the all-around awfulness of Robot Monster, a feat that only really, really bad movies seem to accomplish. However, seeing it once is more than enough.

A creature from another planet known as Ro-Man has been sent to Earth to wipe out the rest of the human race after most had been destroyed by death rays or something. Six people remain - a boy, his two sisters, and his mother, as well as two archaeologists the boy met in a cave - and they have some kind of immunity against Ro-Man death rays. But Ro-Man will surely find a way to kill them... or will he?

Heh. Actually, none of that really happens. To spoil everything right from the start, the whole movie is a dream. God. Damn. It. I should have seen that coming after things stopped making any kind of sense in the beginning, when the boy, Johnny, falls in the entrance of the cave and suddenly the entire freaking story does a complete turnaround for no reason whatsoever. Now it just seems so moot to spend a few paragraphs griping about the ridonkulous shit that happens in Robot Monster because it was from the mind of a bitchy little kid. Not fair.

There are some things that I must talk about though. First of all, Ro-Man himself who was truly fantastic to behold. I just want to know who in the heck thought that a thing from another planet would be a gorilla in a scuba diving helmet. Not that anything in this movie really makes any sense, but come on. I think the true story actually is that the filmmakers had a gorilla suit laying around or something and decided to use it in Robot Monster. Nice ingenuity for saving on the budget. Sixteen thousand dollars can't get you squat, apparently, least of all a costume that resembles either a robot or a monster.

Speaking of things taken from other movies, there are some other nonsensical scenes in this movie that can be explained by the simple fact that they edited in scenes from other movies. Of course I'm talking about the random scene at the beginning (and one later at the end) where Johnny gets knocked out in the cave. There's some flashes of light coupled with a really annoyed sound effect that gets repeated over and over and over again, and suddenly a giant lizard and komodo dragon (I don't know if that's what they really were, I'm not an animal expert) are rolling around the desert fighting. Say what? Wh- where did that come from and what does it have to do with Ro-Man? Nothing, really.

And then there's the people. If this really had been an end-of-the-world story, I would have been ashamed that these people were representing the human race. They're idiots. I was rooting for Ro-Man most of the time because these guys don't really do anything productive to try to stop him. They waste time wandering around the desert, arguing with each other, then suddenly falling in love and having an impromptu wedding. Dumb. Just dumb. The best part about this whole little scenario is when Karla, the little girl, utters one of those great "kids say the darnedest things" lines. It is implied that Alice, Johnny's older sister, and Roy, one of the archaeologists, kind of get a little kinky in the desert together. When they return to the "house," Karla asks them if they've been playing house together. I almost died with laughter. But that's about where the amusement for Robot Monster ends.

I am just so glad that I had to jump through all these hoops to get this movie watched for Project Terrible (thanks, blog buddy!). I can now say that I have seen yet another of one of the worst movies ever made. Is that good for me or bad for me? I can't decide.

Take us out, hard-to-read title screen...

Project Terrible: Android Insurrection (2012)

Fuck me, have I about had it with technology this week.

When I went to watch my newly assigned Project Terrible movie - Android Insurrection - this morning on my instant streaming, I literally watched it for five minutes before my PS3 up and fucking DIED on me. It is just fucking dead. So I wasted $1.29 to get Android Insurrection out of Redbox and I bought me a Blu-ray player with wireless so I got Netflix back. The PS3 will just have to sit in the corner and think about what it's done before I decide whether or not I want to get it fixed or buy a new one.

Anyway, on to the review of the shitty robot movie.

For serious, why do they even bother to make movies like this at all? They can't have made any money off of it at all (except maybe for my $1.29) and they spent some money on CGI for a movie that absolutely does nothing and says nothing. Android Insurrection is not only just a plain old shitty movie, it's boring. BO-ring. With a weak plot and atrocious effects, this low-budget sci-fi flick wasn't even worth the effort. The thanks goes to our newest PT member, Alex Jowski, who was kind enough to replace the much more promising-looking movie Vampire Wars with this turd. 

Led by tough leader Karen Foxwell, a group of military-type people are the best robot-killers around. After a tough two-week mission, they are immediately sent on a more secretive mission to a facility in order to retrieve an android that's gone rogue. The android has built some kind of machine that does... something. I think it was something bad that could kill humans. But they're supposed to destroy this thing but also bring back an android that can help them? Yes? No? Who cares. Moving on.

I have only one nice thing to say about the movie, which is that it has a nice opening credit sequence. The animation is cool and there is a guy giving a speech about how great robots are and how useful they are to humans, and then it goes on to imply that humans should be careful around the robots. Dun dun DUN! But this sequence is so misleading as to the quality of the rest of the film, which quickly reveals itself to be just as bad as, if not worse than, a stock SyFy movie.

I can't even be funny about this movie because there's almost nothing going on here to talk about. Poor dialogue doesn't move the story along at all, and the story itself paper thin and nothing you haven't seen in literally every single freaking science fiction movie ever made. Even as a action movie, Android Insurrection is a failure. Several of our main group are killed by the rogue android - and not a single thing is seen. It's not even implied. I have no idea how that thing killed anybody. The rest of the action is shit as well, as the guys just sort of stand there and limply shoot their guns at stuff, relying on the CG sparks or whatever to let us know that the guns are actually firing. 

The faceless, unimportant characters are all pulled straight from the cliche handbook - tough chick, smart mouth tough chick, sunglass-wearing cocky bastard, skinny nerd, ball-busting muscle guy, and slimy corporate guy. Blah blah blah, just kill these uninteresting people already, I didn't care about them from the start. The main tough chick, Foxwell, is emotionless and authoritative like a commander should be. They mention a couple times that she never gets hit when they go on a mission and she really hates androids, so I immediately knew that she actually was an android herself. And surprise, surprise, she is. That was the big twist, but it was ridiculously unnecessary. Also, the Colonel had a horrendous German accent.

The same sets are used over and over again and not a single thing screamed to me that this was supposed to be the year 2532. There's a white Chevy truck somewhere in there, metal filing cabinets, paper notes taped to doors - I mean seriously, this is 500 years in the future? The movie is so small and has absolutely no scope in terms of creating a sense of urgency or danger for the characters. An amazing thing about these sets is how the huge freaking robots are able to jump out of nowhere in them, completely unseen and unheard by the characters until they are right next to them. Ridic. The whole thing is absolutely ridic. Good thing the movie is short.

Ugh, what a bore and what a waste. Nothing about Android Insurrection is entertaining because it's just the same old recycled sci-fi shit. I'm almost more angry at it for being so lazy rather than amused at its shittiness. 

Last up for Project Terrible, is a robot movie from the 50s. Is it going to be better or worse than this one? I honestly don't know!