After the commercially successful Nightmare on Elm Street, Horror "auteur" Wes Craven decided he would attempt a more romantic drama combined with sci-fi elements. Much to his chagrin, after test screenings, fans of his earlier blood-fests demanded that the film be re-cut and all the gore they were used to in a Wes Craven film be re-introduced.
The protagonist is boy genius Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux) who has just arrived in town with him mom Jeannie (Ann Twomey). He becomes friends with a newspaper delivery boy Tom Toomey (Michael Sharrett) and falls for his next door neighbor Samantha Pringle aka Sam (Kristy Swanson) who is subject to constant abuse from her alcoholic father Harry (Richard Marcus).
The first third of the film focuses on Paul's pet robot BB (voiced by Charles Fleischer), a contraption that cost the studio approximately $20,000 to create. BB protects Paul by getting into a confrontation with a teenage bully who rides a motorcycle along with his thuggish pals.
BB is eventually destroyed at the hands of a reclusive old woman by the name of Elvira Parker who dispatches the robot from her front porch with a shotgun.
The main plot focuses on Kristy who is thrown down the stairs by her father and sustains a severe head injury in which she ends up on life support. This is where the film devolves into what one might term complete stupidity. Paul, using his computer skills and rudimentary knowledge of brain surgery, plants a microchip in Sam's brain. She miraculously wakes up but is nothing more than a home grown zombie.
Cheap thrills abound in the last third of the film where zombie Sam dispatches all the baddies including her father, the motorcycle kid and mean-spirited Elvira. Even Paul is subject to his ex-girlfriend's wrath-he too ends up strangled at the hands of Sam. There is a twist at the very end which makes no sense: somehow Sam's face and skin peel away revealing half-robotic arms and a skull-like visage coupled with BB's voice.
Shame on all the bloodthirsty adolescents who clamored for the studio to change Mr. Craven's original version. We're left with a film that rightly bombed at the box office but shamefully ended up as a cult classic chiefly among misguided adolescents addicted to such unmitigated blood-fests.
The protagonist is boy genius Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux) who has just arrived in town with him mom Jeannie (Ann Twomey). He becomes friends with a newspaper delivery boy Tom Toomey (Michael Sharrett) and falls for his next door neighbor Samantha Pringle aka Sam (Kristy Swanson) who is subject to constant abuse from her alcoholic father Harry (Richard Marcus).
The first third of the film focuses on Paul's pet robot BB (voiced by Charles Fleischer), a contraption that cost the studio approximately $20,000 to create. BB protects Paul by getting into a confrontation with a teenage bully who rides a motorcycle along with his thuggish pals.
BB is eventually destroyed at the hands of a reclusive old woman by the name of Elvira Parker who dispatches the robot from her front porch with a shotgun.
The main plot focuses on Kristy who is thrown down the stairs by her father and sustains a severe head injury in which she ends up on life support. This is where the film devolves into what one might term complete stupidity. Paul, using his computer skills and rudimentary knowledge of brain surgery, plants a microchip in Sam's brain. She miraculously wakes up but is nothing more than a home grown zombie.
Cheap thrills abound in the last third of the film where zombie Sam dispatches all the baddies including her father, the motorcycle kid and mean-spirited Elvira. Even Paul is subject to his ex-girlfriend's wrath-he too ends up strangled at the hands of Sam. There is a twist at the very end which makes no sense: somehow Sam's face and skin peel away revealing half-robotic arms and a skull-like visage coupled with BB's voice.
Shame on all the bloodthirsty adolescents who clamored for the studio to change Mr. Craven's original version. We're left with a film that rightly bombed at the box office but shamefully ended up as a cult classic chiefly among misguided adolescents addicted to such unmitigated blood-fests.