Burl reviews Deadly Blessing! (1981)

With a chinbeard and a fearsome frown it’s Burl, here to review culty cornpone horror! Yes, it’s an early, which is to say pre-Elm Street, effort from Wes Craven; not one of his better-loved pictures, it’s true, but it’s also not Swamp Thing! It’s a movie about something deadly, but it’s not Deadly Friend! No no, gumchewers, today we’re talking about the one and only Deadly Blessing!

I’ve seen this one a few times over the years, and I’ll admit to you right now that I’ve never gotten a handle on it! I could never really remember what it was - a slasher movie? a killer cult story? supernatural demon horror? I guess I still don’t really know, except that it might be all of them, ha ha!

It’s a Texas picture all right, but I suspect it’s meant to be set in Pennsylvania somewhere! It’s set on a colony of “Hittites,” which don’t seem to be connected in any way to the ancient civilization, but are more like real far gone Hutterites! “They make the Amish look like swingers,” Sharon Stone says!

Yes, Sharon Stone, whom we know from Total Recall and The Quick and the Dead and of course Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, is in this picture, looking very gorgeous too, but the main character is Martha, played by Maren Jensen! It seems her husband Jim, an ex-Hittite, has a fatal encounter with a tractor one night in the barn! Now a widow, Martha invites her two friends, Stone’s Lana and another one called Vicky, to stay with her on the farm, “Our Blessing,” it’s called, situated right next door to the Hittite colony! But of course the Hittites fear and despise the outlanders, or at least some of them do, and heretics like Jim especially, so they do not make very good neighbours! A manchild played by Michael Berryman from Weird Science keeps popping over to accuse Martha of being the incubus, but this isn’t Incubus after all, and she’s quite innocent of the charge! (Seeing poor Berryman run around in the hot Texas sun, knowing that in real life he is unable to sweat and is thus highly susceptible to heat exhaustion, really made me feel for the poor guy!)

Ernest Borgnine, famous for his role in When Time Ran Out, struts around being psychotically stern and dementedly pious, while Jeff East from Up the Creek and Pumpkinhead plays a sympathetic young Hittite who begins a tentative romance with Vicky! Bloodless knife murders very occasionally spice things up; a snake turns up in the bath; and Craven gets in some of his soon-to-be-patented dream sequences! And then at the very end the floor busts open and things get decidedly supernatural for the downbeat ending! Ha ha!

There are a few darn good moments in the picture, which I had either forgotten of never previously appreciated! But there are quite a few dull patches too, and for long stretches the thing feels like a somnolent rural horror picture in the vein of, say, Funeral Home! I’d imagine that if you’re not in the proper mood, it might come off as a little dull! But it manages some countryside atmosphere and a few good shocks, and the mighty Borgnine gives a good performance as the sort of holy jerk to whom you want to deliver a sharp kick to the inner rectus! Ha ha, I give Deadly Blessing one and a half spiders in the mouth!