Wes Craven’s film career was a notoriously uneven one – for every classic film there was one or two absolute stinkers, a level of inconsistency that is hard to fathom. Most filmmakers who have career lows tend to have a gradual (or even sudden) decline that is essentially a one-way trip – that or they are jobbing directors who clearly have less interest in some projects than others and show that with indifferent filmmaking. But Craven’s terrible films are often movies that he seems to have approached with some enthusiasm – sometimes writing them as well as directing. It’s a baffling career arc that suggests that perhaps he was only as good as the people that he was working with. Certainly, Craven’s best horror movies are striking works. His worst are breathtakingly bad.
Still, there are those Craven films that I don’t believe to be as awful as many people say. They might not be classics but there are a few of his lesser-regarded movies that I believe hold up rather better than their reputation might suggest. Foremost among them is Deadly Blessing, his 1981 rural horror movie that is widely dismissed but which I would suggest is worth another look. It’s not great by any means – but it is better than you might remember.
Deadly Blessing is Wes Craven’s transitional film – the bridge between his visceral 1970’s films and the more mainstream and generally less interesting stuff he’s done since the 1980s. It has a curious feel – more like his TV movie Summer of Fear/A Stranger in the House than a feature film, spliced in nudity aside – and although 1981 was still effectively part of 1970s cinema in style, it seems oddly out of time.
The film centres around the religious Hittite community, effectively Amish but for the name, who shun the modern world and have ostracised former member Jim (Douglas Barr), who has left the community and married Martha (Maren Jensen), who is seen by the religious fanatics as ‘the incubus’ (a phrase seemingly attached to any woman they meet). When Jim is killed in what appears to be an accident, Martha’s friends Lana (Sharon Stone) and Vicky (Susan Buckner) visit, causing more unrest with their hot pants, braless T-shirts and continual need to wear silk nightdresses and lingerie (at the insistence of the producers, apparently). As members of the Hittite community start to turn up dead and the girls are terrified by a combination of jump scares and spiders (Sharon Stone in particular flipping between hysteria and near-catatonia), the film slowly plops to a rather unlikely and fairly incoherent climax, before ending on a moment of such idiocy (another producer addition in post-production) that it rather sours the rest of the movie.
Deadly Blessing channels 1970s rural horrors like Crowhaven Farm and Touch of Melissa (a TV movie and a PG-rated horror, notably) with its culture-clash storyline, though the identity of the killer – and the motivation – are kept a secret until the rather confused end. You’re unlikely to guess who it is, simply because both the killer and the motivation make very little sense – it feels like a cobbled-together ending, though it was apparently in the screenplay from the start. What does become obvious early on is that the Hittites, led by scenery-chewing Ernest Borgnine, are so sinister and threatening that they have to be red herrings – and indeed they are. But Craven does at least bring a rounded authenticity to his religious fanatics – possibly because he grew up in an equally repressive fundamentalist community, and so knows that mindset only too well.
Craven certainly piles on incident – to keep the audience from nodding off between killings, there are moments of threat, a snake-in-the bathtub scene that he would riff on in A Nightmare on Elm Street a few years later (fans of movie mistakes will be saddened to hear that in the widescreen version, the infamous ‘woman wearing her panties in the bath’ scene that caused guffaws on VHS has now been framed so that the knickers are off-screen) and assorted creeping around spooky barns – but Deadly Blessing still manages to have a rather slow, steady pace that might grate with some viewers but possibly suits the theme. It genuinely does have a TV movie feel, with significantly bloodless kills by the standard of 1981 (this restraint probably hasn’t helped the film’s reputation), and the presence of Maren Jensen as the lead actress doesn’t help. While she’d achieved fame in Battlestar Galactica, by the time this film came out, that show was becoming a fading memory, and her star status was in rapid decline. As an actress, she doesn’t have the presence to engage the audience (and her character’s nude scenes are all done with a body double). Sharon Stone, in her first proper film role, is more striking, even though her character has little to do and you can see that even at this stage, she had a steely, ruthless determination to be famous. The most effective heroine is Susan Buckner, who is less overtly glamorous but more effortlessly sexy and believable as a character. Craven regular Michael Berryman pops up as a backward Hittite, and is both amusing and sympathetic, but the rest of the male characters – Borgnine aside – are pretty bland and forgettable. This is a film about the female characters.
It’s easy to dismiss Deadly Blessing, and it’s certainly no lost classic. The production interference and the clumsy reveal at the end – one that will be more controversial with modern audiences than it was at the time, I suspect – make it feel like a compromised work that needed more thought and a singular vision. Like his contemporary Tobe Hooper, Craven often had producer issues and it certainly hasn’t helped with his filmmaking consistency. But this is one of the better of his lesser works, a film that might have a better reputation had it been made by a less well-known director. The ludicrous ending aside, it’s a passably entertaining time-waster, with some good visual moments that hint at his films to come. Lower your expectations and you’ll probably enjoy this.
DAVID FLINT
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