Deadly Blessing (1981)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) Writer-Director Wes Craven has had a very strange career. His filmography includes everything between horror-defining classics and some of the ordinary derivative filmmaking imaginable. Deadly Blessing is closer to the bottom of the barrel, although not quite the worst. The story is pure farmhouse horror, as a widow and two visiting friends have to fend off the aggressive behaviour of a local sect of totally-not-Amish farmers. It’s all quite unusual in terms of what passed for slasher horror back in the early 1980s (the rural setting is distinctive enough) and while Craven’s execution still had some young-filmmaker energy, the sum of it all doesn’t quite make up something worth remembering. Weird ending, too; when is a slasher not a slasher, it perhaps should foreshadow that it’s not a slasher. Amusingly, Sharon Stone stars (not very well) in a very early role, while Ernest Borgnine doesn’t cover himself with honours with a histrionic performance as a sect elder. Some individual moments are interesting (the bathtub-snake sequence strongly suggests another bathtub scene in Craven’s later Nightmare on Elm Street) but Deadly Blessing as a whole is more dud than success—although, as any Craven fan knows, there are far worse movies in his filmography.