The comical irony of Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend is that for a film so obsessed with science—specifically neurology and artificial intelligence—it gives approximately zero hoots about concrete reality. Centering on a boy genius and his BFF robot, BB, Deadly Friend builds to a climatic moment when the robotically reanimated girl next door, Samantha (Kristy Swanson), throws a basketball at the neighborhood buzzkill’s head, smashing the cantankerous woman’s cranium. So, could this really happen? No. According to , it would take “500 kgf, or the force that 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) would exert in standard gravity” to break a human skull. That’s, like, a lot. Plus, even if Samantha’s animatronic arm were hypothetically able to whip the basketball with that amount of force, an explosion of the kind depicted would still be unlikely: Pressure would have to come from inside the skull in order to force brain matter to splatter outward with such intensity. [Kiva Reardon]
