Deadly Friend

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Deadly Friend
The movie poster for Deadly Friend.
Directed by	Wes Craven
Produced by	Robert L. Crawford Patrick Kelley Robert M. Sherman
Written by	Diana Henstell (novel Friend) Bruce Joel Rubin (screenwriter)
Starring	Matthew Laborteaux Kristy Swanson
Music by	Charles Bernstein
Cinematography	Philip H. Lathop
Editing by	Michael Eliot
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date(s)	October 10, 1986
Running time	91 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Deadly Friend is a 1986 sci-fi/horror movie. The film is based on the novel entitled Friend by Diana Henstell, which was adapted for the screen by Bruce Joel Rubin. Deadly Friend is directed by Wes Craven.

Taglines:

Some people are just better off dead.

If you're not afraid of the unknown...

There's no one alive who'll play with the girl next door.

Grab A Friend before someone in the audience grabs you!

Not all nightmares happen on Elm Street.

1 Plot summary
2 Cast
3 Differences between the book and movie
4 Alternate Versions of the Movie
5 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Whiz kid Paul Conway and his mother, Jeannie, just moved into a new city and things are great. Paul is studying the neurology and artificial intelligence at the local college, and has built a highly functioning robot named BB. Paul makes some new friends; Tom, and a girl named Samantha who lives next door to the Conways. They have a mean old lady, Elvira Parker, for a neighbor who isn't fond of strangers on her property. On Halloween night as a prank, Paul, Tom and Samantha have BB crack the combination lock on her gate so that one of them can walk up and ring Elvira's doorbell to scare her. Samantha is the one who goes forth to do it and as she rings the doorbell, an alarm sounds and all three take cover beside Elvira's porch. BB reactivates himself and starts coming through the fence and Elvira is wielding her shotgun at him and starts to fire, killing BB.

Samantha struggles with an abusive father, who ultimately beats her so severely that she is left close to death. The doctors tell Paul that she doesn't have long to live, and together Paul and Tom steal Samantha's body. Paul surgically implants BB's AI chip into Samantha's brain. Samantha is activated by BB's remote control and is alive but later on she goes on a homicidal rampage. She kills people that have been mean. Because she has BB's memories, she is out of control.

[edit] Cast

Matthew Laborteaux ... Paul Conway
Kristy Swanson ... Samantha
Michael Sharrett ... Tom
Anne Twomey ... Jeannie Conway
Richard Marcus ... Harry
Anne Ramsey ... Elvira Parker
Lee Paul ... Sergeant Volchek
Charles Fleischer ... BB (voice)
Russ Marin ... Dr. Johanson
Joel Hile ... Deputy

[edit] Differences between the book and movie

In the book, the re-animated Samantha becomes more and more corpse-like as the story progresses.

The ending of the book is totally different from the ending in the movie, in which Sam turns into a robot that closely resembles BB before snapping Paul's neck off-screen. The book ends at a moment in which Sam and Paul are on a bridge, fighting in the rain; Sam is on top of Paul, and Paul, thinking that Sam is trying to kill him, kicks her so hard that she goes over the railing and crashes through the ice below. Paul then realizes that Sam wasn't trying to kill him, but rather trying to take him with her when she would have jumped anyway, because, "...she did not want to go into the darkness alone. She wanted him with her." Paul then swan dives off the bridge, with the final line of the book being Paul's final thought- "So this is what love comes to".
Paul's nickname in the book, Piggy, is never mentioned in the film.
The old woman who kills BB in the film is Elvira Parker. In the book, she is Elvira Williams.
The infamous "basketball decapitation" scene is not present in the book. In the book, Sam murders Elvira by drowning her in her bathtub
In the film, BB is killed when Elvira blows him apart with a shotgun. In the book, the shotgun is still the instrument of BB's destruction, but it is Samantha's father who wields the weapon, and he beats BB to death with it.
In the film, Samantha and Paul are in their mid-teens. In the book, Sam is around twelve years old and Paul is only thirteen.
The persona of Dr. Johanson differs greatly between the book and the film. In the film, he is a friendly man who welcomes Paul to the university. In the book, he is old, stubborn, ignorant and grouchy, clashing with Paul on several occasions.

[edit] Alternate Versions of the Movie

The original USA VHS release of the movie contained cuts which were implemented by the MPAA in order to prevent an X rating (at the time, 1986, there was no NC-17 rating). These scenes have been restored on the DVD release from the Twisted Terror Collection released by Warner Bros. on Sept. 25th, 2007. These scenes include:

In the scene where Samantha is dreaming about her father intruding in her bedroom, Samantha breaks a vase on her nightstand and stabs her father in the stomach with it. In the VHS release all that is shown is blood spurting out on Samantha's bed and close-ups of her father's face laughing and taunting Sam. On the newly released DVD, the scene includes blood spurting out on Sam's face and lots of it and close ups of Sam's face as she screams and gets coated in blood.

In the scene where Sam takes her revenge on her murderous father, Sam trips her father on the stairs leading to the boiler room and burns him inside the boiler. In the VHS release, when Paul comes to conceal the body, the scene is edited to briefly show Paul pulling Sam's father out of the boiler, without showing much of his charred body. In the DVD release, when Paul pulls her father's upper body from the boiler, as he pulls him out and puts him on the ground, a close-up of his charred skeletal face is shown.

In the infamous 'basketball' scene, Samantha crushes Elvira's head with a slam from the basketball that Elvira had stolen from the teens earlier in the movie. In the VHS release, when Sam throws the ball at her, Elvira's head explodes on impact and then cuts back to Sam watching in amazement as Elvira's headless body wanders around the living room until it falls down in the floor. In the DVD release, when Sam throws the ball at Elvira's head, more explosion is shown as Elvira's head completely shatters from her shoulders and shows her headless body wander directly from the wall around the living room, spurting blood and then cuts back to Sam watching in amazement as the body comes to rest in the floor.

In an earlier version of the movie, Elvira's death was filmed to be less gory than the final shot. Instead of shattering her head with a Basketball, Sam smashes Elvira through her front door leaving the upper half of her body hanging outside the door and the lower half still inside. In the same earlier version, in the scene where Paul is dreaming about Sam's father coming up out of his bed, Sam's father comes completely out of the bed and lunges for Paul. In the final cut of the film just his charred head comes out of the bed and exhales smoke. These alternate scenes can be seen in the theatrical trailer found on the new DVD.