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1981 - USA Directed By: Wes Craven Starring:: Maren Jensen, Jeff East, Susan Buckner, Ernest Borgnine, Lois Nettleton, Sharon Stone, Colleen Riley, Douglas Barr, Lisa Hartman, Kevin Cooney and Michael Berryman.
Current Availability
A long awaited UK R2 DVD of this long OOP Craven film will finally be released by Arrow on the 29/10/2007. As with the old UK pre cert VHS on the Spectrum/Polygram label and the later Channel 5 VHS edition this DVD will be the complete, uncut version featuring the notorious surprise ending. There is also a forthcoming Australian R4 DVD release that will feature the added bonus of a feature commentary with Wes Craven. UK viewers with digital subscriptions should also be aware that this film also airs fairly regularly on the Zone Horror channel.
Recommended?
Yes. It is an underrated little film that forms an interesting part of Craven's early filmography offering good acting, well crafted shock moments and an underlying sense of rural menace. Those that favour atmosphere and tension over a more visceral approach should enjoy it.
Review
Following the groundbreaking directorial debut that was the trend setting, infamous, rape/revenge shocker The Last House On The Left (1972) and the unexpected success of his second feature, the ferocious genre classic The Hills Have Eyes (1977), director Wes Craven found himself in an unusual and in some ways unenviable position. With The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, Craven had not only fashioned two films that both rapidly ascended to cult status but also in many respects encapsulated the burnt our fury and desperation of the era in which they were made. With his place in the horror genre’s hall of fame essentially confirmed after just two features it is in retrospect fair to say that anything Craven had done next would somehow be interpreted as either a letdown and/or a step backwards.
After directing the forgettable if proficient TV movie Summer Of Fear (1978) Craven embarked on his third cinematic feature - Deadly Blessing. Changing tack completely, Deadly Blessing was the very antithesis of Craven’s first two films – a deliberately understated rural chiller with pronounced supernatural overtures. While some expressed surprise that Craven had so drastically changed direction, all in all Deadly Blessing (predictably) attracted little acclaim with most critics arriving at the opinion that the film was little more than the work of a talented director killing time. More importantly Deadly Blessing failed to replicate the commercial success or attain the cult reverence of either of Craven’s previous features. Little more than a footnote in its makers early filmography, bridging the gap between his incendiary early work and his classic A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), these days Deadly Blessing is mainly remembered for providing a young Sharon Stone with an early, pre-fame role. Therefore, it is perhaps Deadly Blessing above all other films is the Craven oeuvre that is most in need of some serious critical reanalysis.
Deadly Blessing stars Maren Jensen as the headstrong Martha who together with her husband Jim have forged themselves a happy life living in a sleepy middle American farming community. Most of the farmland in the area is owned and run by an extremist religious cult known as the Hittites, led by the devout, sinister and cruel Isaiah. The Hittites are an obsessively devout people who live in fear of the Incubus – a diabolical entity which seduces the faithful and virtuous in their sleep.
Tragedy strikes when Martha and Jim’s happiness is cruelly cut short by Jim, himself a former Hittite and Isaiah’s estranged son, being killed in an inexplicable accident. Following Jim’s funeral Martha is joined by her old friends Lana and Vicky who have traveled from Los Angeles to spend the week with her. The three young women soon find themselves the target of a number of strange, unexplainable and frightening occurrences. Are these the work of the Hittites, who have vested financial interests in accruing Martha’s farm? Or are they, as Isaiah so fervently insists, the Incubus making its evil presence felt?
Despite having been shunted down to second tier status beneath Craven’s more revered works Deadly Blessing stands tall as an underrated addition to the early eighties horror stakes. In order to really appreciate Deadly Blessing it is, I feel, necessary to place the film in perspective, taking into account that it was made at a time when the North American horror genre revolved the tiresome slasher movie craze, launched by the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Craven’s The Last House On The Left collaborator Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday The 13th (1980). Although Deadly Blessing makes the odd concession to the slasher craze, Craven’s decision to present the film as a comparatively understated chiller in certainly an atypical one for its time. Craven avoids bloodshed and histrionics instead hinging the film on a steadily built atmosphere of rural disquiet. This approach has been criticised as dull by many but personally this reviewer feels that Craven establishes an intense feeling of unidentifiable, lurking menace that rarely errs and is accentuated by fine performances, an eerie James Horner score (from before he turned to the blockbusters) and some effective shock moments. The best of these is an unbearably claustrophobic scene in which Lana, played by Sharon Stone, finds herself locked in a darkened barn. This tense prolonged shock is all the better for having a pleasingly gruesome resolution. Craven’s other notable coup is a skin crawling extended motif involving a snake crawling into Martha’s bathtub in a disturbing blend of phallic symbolism and nightmarish ophidiophobic revulsion.
Of course no discussion on the subject of Deadly Blessing would be complete without deliberating upon the opinion-dividing shock ending. Aside from the general down turned approach this is the one element of the film that has come in for the most criticism, with many complaining that this final scene completely negates all that has gone before it. This is not strictly true as Craven throughout the film does actually maintain a crafty ambiguity as to whether the unfolding events are the work of human hands or rooted in the supernatural.
If anything the ending is problematic in that (without giving anything away) it corroborates the warnings of Isaiah pertaining to a certain matter which had, until this point, been presented as a superstitious absurdity. Nonetheless, the only question that ultimately matters is whether the ending, taken at face value, actually work? The answer to this is a resounding yes. Casting aside arguments of logic the final scene makes for a lightening bolt of fantastical terror. The viewer is offered no forewarning of what is about to occur and is resultantly left reeling with shock as the end credits begin to roll over. Without sliding into exaggeration this ranks as one of the most purely frightening shocks in Craven’s entire portfolio and if one wanted to go even further, possibly the best “unexpected final shocks” since Brian De Palma set the ball rolling for such things with Carrie (1976).
Moving onto the cast, Maren Jensen makes for a sympathetic a likable heroine, far from the run of the mill scream queen; Jensen makes a strong, convincing impression as a vivacious and headstrong young woman trying to piece her life back together in the wake of her husbands death. A pity her career never got out of the blocks following this movie. Infact all three main female protagonists are strong, personable young women as opposed to the usual simpering, slasher blonde's and Sharon Stone does indeed display a hint of promise in this formative appearance. The real acting honours however, could only ever belong to the legendary Ernest Borgnine, so memorably commanding in the return of the pious, wicked Hittite leader Isaiah. Flying off into a violent, puritanical rage over the slightest transgression Borgnine, without lurching into hamminess, brings a sinister air of barely pent up cruelty to the part. Craven also, once more, utilises bald crag faced horror icon Michael Berryman (one of the cannibal clan in The Hills Have Eyes and the films poster star) to good effect. Berryman is well at home in the role of William – a brutish Hittite man-child who initially seems to be a prime candidate for perpetrator of all the untoward goings on. Yet William ultimately proves to be a red herring (as Berryman’s characters are in most genre efforts), falling victim to the real killer fairly early on.
While accomplished in so many respects Deadly Blessing is not without its flaws. After establishing and maintaining such a unique sense of understated apprehension in the first hour Craven unfortunately loses control somewhat in the final third allowing Deadly Blessing to degenerate into a far more standard tale of an unidentified killer on the prowl. The main problem is that, whilst the revelation is executed well enough, the gender bending true identity of the mystery killer, although totally unexpected, makes no sense with the said individuals motivations awarded scant explanation. To be frank it is a most unsatisfying resolution and p[perhaps, it is fortunate therefore, that Craven swiftly negates it altogether with the shock ending not five minutes later.
Chances are that the low key approach and emphasis on a slowly built sense of tension as opposed to more blatantly overt shocks and gore will see many viewers reared on the more conventional, obvious approaches of contemporary horror continue to shun Deadly Blessing as dull and uneventful. This is really quite unfair as while by no means a “classic” and fairly flawed in some respects, Deadly Blessing is nothing less than a novel, worthwhile effort. Viewers willing to excuse the odd slow patch and a ponderous denouement will find themselves rewarded with a well acted and proficiently handled chiller, which conjures up an effective air of religious fervour and eerie backwoods unease that seldom errs. In conclusion The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes were both vital, exceptional hybrids of exploitation and horror but if anything it is Deadly Blessing that confirmed Craven’s talent as being more than two happy accidents, proving his status as an exceptional filmmaker, equally as comfortable with expressing the creepily understated as he was the purely visceral.
Also Try... The Devil's Rain / Summer Of Fear / The Hills Have Eyes (1977, Wes Craven) / The Last House On The Left / The Night God Screamed / Brotherhood Of Satan.
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