Deadly Friend (1986) on Netflix
Teenage robot builder Paul Conway moves to Welling with his mother and his robot BB. He befriends paperboy Tom Toomey and falls for Samantha Pringle, whose father Harry hurts her at home.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.6/109,997 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes20%
Trailer
Plot summary
Paul Conway is a teenage prodigy who builds robots. He and his mother Jeannie move to the town of Welling, where Polytech has given him a scholarship and Dr. Johanson teaches. The robot BB comes with them, and Paul becomes friends with Tom Toomey, a paperboy. Paul grows close to Samantha Pringle, who lives in the house next to his, and whose father Harry, an alcoholic, is violent toward her. Their reclusive neighbor Elvira Parker takes the boys' basketball and will not give it back. On Halloween, Tom persuades Paul to let BB unlock her gate, and Elvira shoots the robot with her shotgun. When Harry throws Samantha down the stairs, doctors say she is brain dead, and Paul plans to revive her by placing BB's microchip in her brain.
Cast
- Andrew Ropertoas Carl
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Deadly Friend (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Wes Craven's original cut was a gentle film, and his own fans killed it. Shown to a test audience made up mostly of his horror following, it drew complaints about the lack of violence, and Warner Bros. marketing then insisted that gore be added.
- Mark Canton, then executive vice president of Warner Bros., had screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin write six additional gore scenes into the script, each bloodier than the last. The film was re-edited around them, which left the finished picture tonally jumbled.
- The added violence earned the film an X rating from the MPAA. Warner Bros. had to trim it and resubmit it thirteen times before an R was granted, with most of the cuts coming out of the death scenes of Harry and Elvira.
- Fighting the censors over the basketball decapitation, Craven assembled what he called a "Decapitation Compilation", eight or ten films with beheadings that had been passed with an R, among them The Omen, and sent it to the MPAA. They sent it straight back, saying they judged only on what they felt in the room.
- The robot BB cost over $20,000 and was built by a firm called Robotics 21. His eyes were made from two 1950s camera lenses, a garage remote control unit and a radio antenna taken from a Corvette, and the machine could lift 7,500 pounds.
- Kristy Swanson told Maxim in May 2000 that the fake head of Elvira destroyed by the basketball had been stuffed with real cow brains, which the crew picked up from a butcher shop.
- Kristy Swanson did not learn her character's robotic walk on set alone: professional mime artist Richmond Shepard taught her all of the mechanical movements, and she said the moves were far harder than they look until he coached her through them.
SPOILER
The notorious ending in which a robot head emerges from the girl was not the writer's idea at all. Bruce Joel Rubin told Fangoria in 1990 that it belonged solely to Warner Bros. boss Mark Canton, adding that you do not tell the president of the studio that his idea stinks.
