Start watching Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend without knowing anything beyond the title and the filmmaker, and it appears to be a movie about a killer robot. BB looks like a cross between Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 and the Nintendo accessory R.O.B., and is the creation of teenage prodigy Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux). In the opening scene of Deadly Friend, released 40 years ago today, a thief breaks into the Conway family van while Paul and his mother, Jeannie (Anne Twomey), pick up food, and a robot arm reaches out from the backseat to grab at the criminal’s throat.
Over the course of the next half-hour, BB alternates between goofy antics like playing basketball and trick-or-treating and more violent behavior, including another physical assault on someone who threatens Paul. BB’s voice, provided by Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Charles Fleischer, sounds a bit like a Gremlin, and he seems perpetually on the verge of going haywire. Then he’s blown to pieces by Paul’s paranoid, shotgun-wielding neighbor Elvira Parker (Anne Ramsey).
