Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing

• 24th Mar 2011

Deadly Blessing almost eluded us here at Filmwerk. It’s an all but forgotten tale told by Craven about murder in a remote location. We have Amish ideals knocking heads with the modern world when a young farmer is killed at the film’s opening.

The grieving wife refuses to move off the land, and instead calls for the support of Sharon Stone in an early leading role. And boy did she come along in leaps and bounds. You’d have to check out an Ed Wood flick to see a worse performance than the one she puts on here.

So who’s responsible for all the troubles? How bad will things get before they go too far?  Is Ernest Borgnine’s Amish leader a man who wants peace or a real oppressor?

Basically our pretty little things with nasty 80s haircuts run around the local area stirring up all sorts of trouble, get haunted by the local goons, have nasty dreams about swallowing spiders (which are pretty creepy) until is a showdown at the end with the local nutter.

It’s a shame but Deadly Blessing comes across more like a TV thriller than a film from the same guy who made Last House On The left or The Hills Have Eyes (never mind the fact that he would in a few years go on to bring us A Nightmare On Elm Street). This doesn’t look very much like a Wes Craven film, not even early Wes Craven that cult enthusiasts love. I would say this is a slight misstep in his career (although his next film was Swamp Thing which didn’t fare much better). But it’s an indicator that Craven would often do a couple of notable films and then turn in something really weak, something he’s done later in his career. After Elm Street he gave us a poor follow*up to his own The Hills Have Eyes. And after the Scream films he turned out Cursed. Craven can’t be described as a director who had it early in his career and then lost it, say like John Carpenter. Craven seems to lose his skills every few years and Deadly Blessing is the first instance of that.

Still, if anyone fancies seeing Sharon Stone acting badly in an early role, or if you’re a big Ernest Borgnine enthusiast (both Craven and Carpenter must have been – they both worked with him in the space of a year) then it’s worth a look. And yes, Borgnine does support the full-on Amish beard. In fact, he’s probably the best thing in this.

Steven Hurst