Just because American films shift from searching to complacent with the turn of the decade doesn't mean '70s horror shit-stirrers must settle into '80s suburbia sheepishly: the home is comfily behind white picket fences, but Wes Craven makes sure the chimney belches black smoke. New whiz-kid on the block Matthew Laborteaux moves into the neighborhood with mother Anne Twomey and his hi-tech science project, a grumbling, whistling, beeping automaton dubbed "B.B." "B.B." -- E.T.? Nerds build their own friends in the electronic age, though babe-next-door Kristy Swanson provides some relief from the gizmos, even with abusive father Richard Marcus continually bruising her. (The patented Craven dream sequence compounds the muffled seaminess with incestuous overtones: Swanson repels the attacking dad by plunging a cracked vase into his chest, so Marcus responds by ejaculating blood on her.) B.B. gets shot to pieces on Halloween, Swanson is put on life-support after her father pushes her down a flight of stairs, and, since he's been experimenting with brain reanimation, Laborteaux easily transplants the robot's chip into the girl's cranium, and there you have it -- a zombified Swanson, kept in the basement until the comely ghoul breaks out for revenge. Bride of Frankenstein plus The Breakfast Club, saith Joe Bob Briggs, yet arguably a critique of Weird Science, and a continuation of A Nightmare on Elm Street, less arguably. Craven disowned the work after pesky producers futzed with the gore quotient, but the film, boldly ridiculous, retains the wackiness of its purpose, namely a send-up of Zemeckis Americana, with troll-like Anne Ramsey's TV-watching (The Bad Seed, distorted on the telly like a shot from Histoire(s) du Cinéma) interrupted by a decapitating round of basketball and Swanson's heroically straight-faced Elsa Lanchester pantomiming. Screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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