Craven's clever handling of what is essentially a routine genre exercise makes Deadly Blessing much better than it deserves to be. He injects a glooming claustrophopic atmosphere as well as staging a couple of genuinely effective moments of suspense. The film also benefits a great deal from the amish country background to which the story is set. The plot is a bit too complex to really work comfortable, though. Craven bares the hypocricy and the narrow philosophy of these religious people and then lets us know they aren't evil either. Ernest Borgnine may be a maniac (in the film) but he isn't capable of going all the way and commit these horrible murders. So the evil must come from somewhere else, but it is never fully explained what from and by who. To confuse its audience even further, the film has a surprise-ending strapped on by the studio afterwards, making everything seem even sillier.

Religion is otherwise a subject Craven knows all too well. He was raised in a deeply fundamentalist Baptist family, where everything was either good or evil, and he struggled for many years to work his way out. The impact of his troubled childhood has been a repeated source for inspiration for his movies ever since, most evident perhaps in The People Under the Stairs and in this film. Nevertheless Craven is today the first to admit that Deadly Blessing in the end didn't became much more than a series of set-pieces rather than one satisfying and coherent whole. Actually, some of the most effective set-pieces proved to be so successful that Craven couldn't stop himself from using them again in later movies. For instance, the by now famous bathtub scene, in which a snake sneak its way up between Maren Jensen's legs, was used again in A Nightmare on Elm Street, with the snake being replaced by, obviously, Freddy's glove. Over-explicit symbolism perhaps, but very memorable. The film's most effective scene is however the one in which Sharon Stone dreams that a big hairy spider is jumping into her mouth while somebody is forcefully holding her head in place. Also this inspired Craven for scenes in The Serpent and the Rainbow (the spider being replaced by snakes). All this is perhaps, if nothing else, Deadly Blessing's greatest achievment, that it gave Craven the chance to develop his own style and try ideas and themes that later became staples in his subsequent movies, from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Scream.

Of the fine cast here Michael Berryman had been "discovered" previously by Craven for The Hills Have Eyes and he returned as a favour here. Young actress Lisa Hartman was also a discovery who later achieved stardom on TV. The most significant name here, however, is of course Sharon Stone in her first talking part. Today Miss Sharon, then a struggling nobody, does everything to withdraw attention from this her first talking role, dismissing it as her "drug movie". Of course it's her drug-movie. She just played herself. A cocaine abusing model on the verge of a nervous brekadown. This is of course the reason for the Sharon Stone references in Scream.

Ultimately Deadly Blessing may have been scolded by howling critics when released, but so had The Hills Have Eyes been, remember. It is nevertheless the most overlooked title in Wes Craven's filmography. It deserves a second look and demands a DVD release now.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.