146 - Deadly Friend

    A genius kid has a fantastic robot that is destroyed.  After a girl dies, he puts a chip from the robot into the girl’s brain, which brings her back to life.
    That was a hard movie to summarize.
    This is not an especially good movie.  It’s watchable, but it also seems to have very unique problems as a result of a troubled production.  This makes it notable.
    First, the movie itself.  The direction is okay.  The budget seems to have been skewed toward the effects work, which means that some of the locations seem to be kind of sparsely decorated.  The script is clunky.  There are some tacky, forced passages of setup that scream out what they are.  There’s no nuance to the script, but this might just be because they were still aiming at a teenage audience.
    The movie is weird.  There were a variety of producers working on the movie, and they kept pulling it in different directions.  The result is that there’s an overall tone to the movie - almost a teen Frankenstein picture - but then there are a few scenes tossed in that pull away from the humanity angle, and push the movie into straightforward horror territory.  The first time one of these scenes happens, it’s confusing.  It’s an abrupt tonal shift that shifts back as soon as the scene is finished.
    The one thing that these horror scenes have in common is that they all enter the realm of humor after a stop at the level of horror.  They just push beyond that point, almost as if they were intending to be a satire of horror excesses.
    There’s one scene that’s especially memorable.

    The weirdest part of the movie is the last scene, which was obviously tacked on as an afterthought.  From what I’ve heard, the head of Warner Brothers asked that this scene be shot and added to the ending.

    This scene is really, really weird.  It’s not clear if it’s intended to be a dream sequence or not.  In either case, it doesn’t work.