Warner Bros. PicturesStart 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).Meanwhile, the movie’s real focus has been building in the background, as Paul befriends Sam (Kristy Swanson), the shy, pretty girl next door. Sam covers up a bruise on her arm when they first meet, and it’s clear she’s being abused by her drunken father (Richard Marcus). It’s Sam, not BB, who will become the target of Paul’s mad science, in a movie that turns out to be Craven’s twisted riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.Like Victor Frankenstein, Paul is a self-taught, self-satisfied genius, and when friendly local paperboy Tom Toomey (Michael Sharrett) asks if he’s also in the 10th grade, he replies that he’s actually on scholarship at a local university. He’s arrogantly dismissive of not only his fellow students but his professor, Dr. Johanson (Russ Marin), with whom he’s working on an experiment to stimulate corpses with electricity. He becomes fixated on Sam after sharing a brief kiss with her, and he’s not beholden to traditional morals or ethics.Deadly Friend starts out as a movie about a goofy basketball-playing robot, but it takes a turn. | Warner Bros. Pictures“Great tits” is Tom’s response when Paul asks about Sam, and she spends the movie having her body non-consensually violated by entitled men. Her sneering father knocks her down the stairs and then acts resentful when he discovers that he’s caused a fatal head injury. Barely a few weeks after losing BB, Paul can’t accept losing Sam, too, so he essentially blackmails Tom into helping him with a horrific plan to kidnap Sam and revive her with the artificial-intelligence technology he used in BB.“I have ideas no one’s ever thought of,” Paul tells Tom, and Sam’s death becomes a convenient way for him to implement them. As is generally the case in the Frankenstein story, though, Paul’s creation doesn’t fulfill his expectations, and the reanimated Sam lurches around robotically, mostly unable to speak but driven to violent revenge. Swanson’s performance is a bit ungainly, but she’s an unsung precursor to recent feminist reinterpretations of the Bride of Frankenstein in movies like The Bride! and Poor Things.Paul practices his mad science on Sam, whether she wants him to or not. | Warner Bros. PicturesJessie Buckley and Emma Stone bring more range and depth to their Bride-like characters, but Swanson captures the haunted quality of a woman who’s been resurrected without being consulted, and who doesn’t understand her strange new existence. Swanson finds the pathos in the classic Frankenstein moment of Sam staring with terrified confusion at her own reflection, in this case while glancing back and forth between the mirror and a photo of herself, Paul, and BB in happier times.Deadly Friend was a troubled production, with studio interference steering it away from Craven’s original YA sci-fi vision toward the horror he was known for, and it’s sometimes awkward and disjointed. But the added gory scenes play into Craven’s larger themes, as Sam initially dreams of killing her father, and Paul is later tormented by a vision of one of Sam’s victims attacking him. Craven knows how to get a visceral reaction from viewers, even if he’s doing it at a calculating studio executive's behest.The contrast between the cheesiness of BB’s hijinks and the darkness of Paul’s true intentions makes Deadly Friend all the more unsettling as it progresses. What starts as a movie about a cute but potentially dangerous robot turns into a nasty story about a proto-incel who decides that he should be allowed to play God, even at the cost of the humanity of the girl he can’t have.Deadly Friend is streaming on Tubi.