Kristy Swanson

  • Deadly Friend (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I don’t think I would have believed in Deadly Friend’s existence had I not actually seen it myself. It’s as if a few 1980s movie genres had been thrown in a blender as a dare, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it’s not an ironic retrospective film. This was put together in the mid-1980s, and it would work as a satire… had it been any better. Consider a film that begins as a typical teen science comedy in which a newly-moved protagonist has a robot pal that does silly things. But then (wait for it) the protagonist’s girlfriend is killed by her abusive father and he transplants his robot buddy’s microchip in her head and she revives and turns murderously evil. I’m not sure you saw that coming, right? Suffice to say that Deadly Friend doesn’t work. A look at its production history reveals numerous changes to the film in post-production, an attempt to capitalize on director Wes Craven’s reputation for gory horror, and how the film was shifted from dark SF thriller to outright gory horror – completely ignoring Craven’s attempt to branch outside the genre he’s best known for. Kristy Swanson does just fine as the killer robot girl, but the film itself is a jumbled mess. An object of contemplation more than entertainment, Deadly Friend has largely been forgotten by history… and it’s not hard to understand why.

  • Highway to Hell (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) As far as high concepts for a horror movie go, retelling Orpheus and Eurydice in a late-1980s context is not bad nor that original – it’s not that big a surprise to find that well-known filmmaker Brian Helgeland came up with the screenplay of Highway to Hell. It helps that the film doesn’t take itself all that seriously despite its classical inspiration, and that it all starts from Las Vegas. As a young man goes to rescue his girlfriend from having been brought to hell by a zombie cop, we get a tour of a satirical vision of the netherworld mocking 1980s society. While the two lead actors remain little-known (well, depending on how you feel about Kristy Swanson), there are a few cameos in supporting roles, including pre-stardom Ben Stiller and Gilbert Gottfried, as none other than Hitler. Unfortunately, despite an imaginative premise and some occasional wit in the execution, Highway to Hell remains limited to cult-movie status: it doesn’t quite have the budget (or the special-effects sophistication) to do justice to its ambitions and must settle for an evocative approximation. Even its best moments almost do it a disservice, highlighting how much better the film could have been had it had the budget, time or additional motivation to do better. But the result is still quite a bit better than you’d expect from a little-known 1991 horror comedy.