lot of elements that are not things I wanted on my resume. And it didn't do very good business, but it was total fun. My kids were on the set every night. My five-year-old Ari was totally in love with Kristy Swanson, who was the lead. She later became Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the movie. She was really sweet to him and even took him on a date." Release Censorship Due to all of the gore scenes that were added into the film—as well as Craven's contentious history with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)—it was initially given an X rating. The film was trimmed and resubmitted to the MPAA thirteen times before it was granted an R-rating. Most of the cuts were made to the death scenes of Harry and Elvira. Marketing The theatrical trailer for the film released by Warner Bros. represented it as a straightforward horror film, omitting any reference to its science fiction elements, with BB not appearing in a single frame. The mixture of teenagers and terror as seen in the trailer implied that Deadly Friend would be like Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. In an interview with Fangoria, Craven said that the deadline for delivering the first cut of Deadly Friend with all of the studio-demanded sequences included, and delivering his original script for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, which he was writing with Bruce Wagner, was virtually the same, making it very difficult for him to do both things at once. Box office Hoping to score a financial success with the Halloween trade, Warner Bros. released Deadly Friend in theaters on October 10, 1986 but the film was a box office bomb, grossing $8,988,731 in the United States against an $11 million budget. Critical response AllMovie gave the film a generally negative review, writing, "It's an intriguing combination of elements, but the end result is a schizoid mess", calling Craven's direction "awkward" and opining that it "lacks the intense, sustained atmosphere of his previous horror hits." On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 20% approval rating based on 35 reviews, with an average rating of 3.7/10, with the consensus reading, "An uninspired departure for Wes Craven, mired by an uneven premise; beware, this is one Deadly Friend. On Metacritic it has a score of 44% based on reviews from 11 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Home