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Deadly Blessing Maren Jensen Sharon Stone PAL UNRATED DVD

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Deadly Blessing (Wes Craven, 1981)

The trailers for Deadly Blessing, way back when, made the movie seem spider-obsessed. Spiders crawling into people's mouths and people running through spiderwebs. I was twelve when this movie came out, and had no idea who anyone in this movie was except Ernest Borgnine and Michael Berryman, both of whom I revered as a kid (and still do). And I hated spiders. I had to see it. And man, did it creep me out. Recently, it got a big honkin' DVD special-edition release pretty much everywhere but the U.S. Recently, I grabbed a copy of it and sat down to relive some old nightmares. While the movie hasn't really aged all too well, it does a lot of the things Wes Craven did very well early in his career, and does them in a different way than most early Wes Craven movies, trading in the cutting-edge gore he was infamous for in the late seventies and going for the atmosphere instead.

The movie takes place in a California Hittite commune (as one character says, a line I've remembered for a quarter-century, "the Hittites make the Amish look like swingers") where, as we open, the shunned Tom Schmidt (Jonathon Gulla in his only screen appearance) and his wife Martha (Battlestar Galactica's Maren Jensen, who also never worked onscreen again after this film) are living on the edges of the commune. Tom's father Isaiah (Borgnine), the leader of the community, shunned Tom not only for going away to Los Angeles to school, but for bringing back a "serpent" wife (the Hittites consider everyone who's a non-Hittite a serpent, at least in this flick) who doesn't share their beliefs. Not long after the film begins, Tom dies in a suspicious tractor accident, and after the funeral, three of Martha's LA friends--Lana (Sharon Stone), Vicky (Grease's Susan Bucker... who one again never worked onscreen after this; are you sensing a trend?), and Melissa (Colleen Riley, who would team up with Craven again four years later for The Hills Have Eyes Part II)--come out to the farm to console her. From here, while it's undoubtedly a cross between a horror flick and a mystery, much of the movie becomes an outsider drama, except that instead of the Hittites being the outsiders, it's the modern folks. (Think Witness here.) Problem is, the four women are being harassed by what the Hittites believe is an incubus, a demon who seduces (figuratively or literally) women in order to turn them away from the faith, but the women themselves believe is the guy who killed Tom. More so, perhaps, because Hittite bodies begin piling up, and the Hittites, believing that the incubus has manifested in Martha, are ready to nail her up and use her as a scarecrow. She finds one friend in the town itself, Faith (veteran TV actress Lisa Hartman), a non-Hittite who is similarly shunned by the community. The women must find out what's going on before either the killer gets them or the Hittites do.

Deadly Blessing does a lot of things right. First and foremost, it's a creepy movie; really effective atmosphere provided by the sets, not to mention Borgnine's crazy Hittite elder. Also, while the script is deeply, deeply prejudiced (though the Hittites aren't a real American religious sect, it's pretty obvious that they're meant to represent the Mennonites), Craven does his best to make the interpersonal relationships between the Hittites and the outsiders levelheaded, at least when the Hittites are treating outsiders like humans (which does occur in a couple of scenes). He also avoids falling into an obvious trap in the Big Reveal, though I can't go into what that is for obvious reasons. And that final scene... man, that's been sticking with me since the early eighties.

While the film has its strengths, it has weaknesses as well, which are divided pretty equally between the script (the already-mentioned prejudice is just the tip of the iceberg) and the acting. It's pretty easy to see why a lot of people who were in this movie never worked again, as their acting is as flat and two-dimensional. However, I am more than willing to grant that in many cases, that may have been the script's fault. Some really, really awful writing here, especially as regards character development, which ranges from the ham-handed to the nonexistent. Some of the characters, even the main ones--especially the main ones, in at least one case--are running around with "kill me" tattooed on their foreheads. It does a great deal to undercut the movie's suspense when you know a character exists just to get killed off at some point.

Not at all the brilliant movie I remember, but it still has some undeniable effect. A minor Craven movie, to be sure, but one that Craven fans will probably be satisfied to see, if America ever gets around to doing a whiz-bang DVD release like Europe and Australia have. ***