Customer Reviews

The Stepfather

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Having always been a fan of the original film, I was curious to see this remake, even though I expected the worst. While this is an OK watch for thriller fans, it is inferior to the original in every way. In fact the original is more intense, more graphic and just more fun! This film looked and felt like a Lifetime TV movie especially with Ward playing the new wife in this tame and pointless remake.

If you looking to watch a film about a psychotic Stepfather, skip the watered down remake and look for the original, which has finally gotten a long over due DVD release this past year, no doubt because of the remake, so I guess the remake did serve a purpose after all.

THE STEPFATHER

STARRING: Dylan Walsh, Penn Badgley, Amber Heard, Sela Ward, Sherry Stringfield, Jon Tenney, Paige Turco and Jessalyn Gilsig

WRITTEN BY: J.S. Cardone, Donald E. Westlake, Carolyn Lefcourt and Brian Garfield

DIRECTED BY: Nelson McCormick

Rated: PG - 13
Genre: Horror / Thriller
Release Date: 16 October 2009



I'll admit that as a fan of the original 1987 version of The Stepfather, I was slightly concerned for the remake when I learned that Dylan Walsh was playing the evil daddy. I'm a huge fan of the show Nip/Tuck on which he plays a real softy. He is such a likeable and sweet guy on the show that I had serious doubts if he would be able to pull of such a nasty role as this. Well just as Heath Ledger surprised all of us in The Dark Knight, Walsh did the same for me here.

His portrayal of David Harris is one of the best performances I have seen from anyone this year. I think what worked so well for me was that he is not at all a creepy looking guy. He is very charming and kind-spirited, so when he gets into this particular character who is a very sinister individual, it really bothers you. How could a guy like this have such a Norman Bates like quality to him?

I think my favorite portion of the film was the first five minutes. You have no idea what the hell is going on. You just see this guy shaving in the mirror and staring at himself oddly. Then he dies his hair. You know something is up but you don't know what exactly. Then he gets dressed and goes downstairs and helps himself to some peanut buttered-toast and coffee. As far as he is concerned, everything is fine. But we know better; the director makes sure of it.

Then out of nowhere we see a child sprawled over the kitchen table; dead, in the middle of breakfast. We know that he is aware of the dead body and yet he continues to act as if nothing is the matter. Now we are creped out. Next he walks around the house preparing to leave and we see other dead bodies. He steps around them as if they were a child's toy or a sleeping dog in his path and it really gets under your skin; especially the way he looks at them, no doubt envisioning how he killed them earlier. It's not very gory, but it's unsettling. Then he turns up the AC and leaves.

I generally despise PG - 13 horror films. They are typically watered down and aimed at junior high school kids with an early bed time. They are very frustrating and disappointing. This is the best one I have seen in years; right up there with The Ring and The Grudge.

I'm not saying it's better than the original, but it's just as good. It's as different from the earlier version as Scream is from Psycho. You get more gore in the first film for sure but you get more wit and suspense out of this one. I'm glad that both films exist.

We learn that David has a history of doing this. The authorities are onto him but don't know exactly who he is. He moves away to a small town in Oregon, changes his identity completely, and looks for a new potential family.

He is very much into having a family, despite the fact that something clearly didn't work out so well with the last one he had.

He meets Susan Harding (Sela Ward) and her small children, casually in a grocery store and the two of them hit it off right away. We flash forward to sometime in the future and learn that they are to be married, are now living together and that Susan has an older son who's about to come back into the picture. He was sent away to a Military reform school for his poor behavior.

Penn Badgley plays Susan's son Michael. Michael is suspicious of David from the get-go and I suspect David gathered this and made a quick effort to win Michael over. At their first meeting he takes Michael downstairs and offers him a drink of liquor from his secret stash and asks him not to tell his mother. David's liquor cabinet in the basement is only one of his many locked compartments which we soon learn the contents of.

Everything is all hunky-dory for a while and then people outside of the family begin to grow suspicious of David; like the old lady across the street that recognizes him from the news and then winds up dead.

Soon enough David's charm starts to wear off and Michael is no longer too fond of him. He seems to be the only one noticing all of the eerie things going on with David. He begins to become infatuated with learning who David is and where he comes from, as things that David has told him about his past, start to not add up.

One of the things that really creeped me out was how David was so interested in what Michael and his girlfriend Kelly (Amber Heard) are doing when no one is around. David is fine with sharing some alcohol with Michael but the thought of his new step-son having sexual relations under hiss roof seems to really get to David.

There is a very well acted scene between David and Kelly alone in the kitchen while Michael is out in the pool. Now Kelly too starts to see that there may be something off with David. I wish that they would have gone a little further with it, but it was still nice.

Eventually David starts to catch on that Michael may be onto him and things start to really heat up. Like I said, the film isn't that gory with its PG - 13 rating; but it's a lot like a Hitchcock film where suspense rather than blood pumps through its veins. And David does some very sick and shocking things.

The climax was very entertaining and Walsh's performance near the end only became more astonishing. He's a much underrated actor and is in definite justification to receive more lead roles of this stature.

Perhaps what kept the film from being better were the other characters and the actors that played them. The actors weren't bad but they weren't great either. David's character was so well developed; I felt that the other people in the story could have used some attention as well.

I hate to start a review with an admission of guilt, but I have to admit that I agreed to see a bargain showing of THE STEPFATHER to placate my bored daughter without any expectations that the film would be decent. So I didn't exactly have an open mind. Sadly, the film did NOTHING to change the mind I had almost made up in advance.

The 1987 original was, in its day, a creepy success. Terry O'Quinn (John Locke on LOST) was a calm, cool & collected psycho killer whose friendly demeanor could shut off in split second and become icy deadness. The basic story is similar in the two movies. The stepfather ingratiates himself into a family where the mother is feeling alone and in need of male companionship, and thus, may overlook a few strange moments in her new beau. There are kids already in place, and their new stepfather works hard to win them over...but they pick up on the fact that a lot of it is fake emotion. When the kids inevitably "disappoint" their new dad, bloody hell takes over and the family is killed, and "dad" moves on to another family.

In the original, the stepfather actually was always juggling two families. He already knew that one would inevitably disappoint him and he'd need another household to move to. When you think about it, this IS pretty creepy...he knows it's just a matter of time before he has to kill everyone, so why not have another family readily at hand. In the remake, the stepfather (Dylan Walsh, from NIP/TUCK) just goes from one to another...as though he thinks each family will be THE ONE.

The story is pretty predictable and familiar (and I bet if I looked back at 1987's film again, it would seem pretty tame...although I doubt the power of O'Quinn's performance will have diminished). New guy moves in and little details about him just don't seem right. Kids grow suspicious, but the newly married mother is oblivious or in denial. As the puzzle comes together, dad becomes more unhinged and all this leads to a final, bloody confrontation. A story as neatly laid out as this requires credible acting and a good pace and good editing sense to have a chance of giving us the creeps we need to feel. The new STEPFATHER doesn't measure up at all.

Walsh is an acceptable choice as the lead character. In NIP/TUCK, Walsh's character Sean is always the guy who on the surface seems like the nice, understanding, decent counterpart to his hedonistic partner, but often behaves just as stupidly. You could argue that he hasn't strayed all that far afield in THE STEPFATHER, but the role of the nice guy with a dark heart fits him. He doesn't do anything spectacular with the role, but he is acceptable. Sela Ward, always a solid if unspectacular actress, plays his new wife...and she's solid but unspectacular. Her dialogue, when she's defending her new man, is hardly of help to her. It's of the "Why can't everyone just be happy for me?" ilk.

So, two crucial characters are in place, and they are okay, particularly for an unambitious, low-budget genre film. But then we've got Penn Badgley and Amber Heard (PINEAPPLE EXPRESS) as the "kids." Each actor is about 23, but supposedly of high school age. Neither looks remotely that young. Badgley is the troubled son who has just come back for the summer from military school. He's sullen and vaguely unhappy, but never convinces as a kid that was bad enough to be sent away. He's mostly petulant, and, frankly, a bad actor. Heard is his long-time girlfriend, and it is apparently her lifelong ambition to strut around in front of her marginally interested boyfriend in a skimpy bikini. I felt somewhat bad for her...she's supposed to be the "rock" that keeps her boyfriend steady and grounded, and she's constantly giving him advice...but it's always in her bikini. Heard is not up to the task, so she comes across as an airhead who is reading lines. And the bikini seems even more out of place, because even though the two are ALWAYS hanging around the backyard pool, the film is lit in such a way that it always feel vaguely overcast and cold outside...I was always thinking she would be covered in goosebumps. It's these two characters who are supposed to finally put two-and-two together about the new man in their lives...but they seem so bland and vacuous that I never believed a single thing either of them said or did on screen. And if you dislike these characters, it's really tough to give a darn about what happens to them.

Also, the movie is PG-13, and this doesn't help. Walsh commits several violent acts, but we always cut away tastefully before we see much of anything, and while I don't need to wallow in gratuitous violence, not seeing ANYTHING really happen never really allows us to fear this guy. For goodness sake, he kills a little old lady from across the street, and we don't feel a thing.

There are occasional amusing elements, such as watching Walsh come up with excuses not to provide a social security number to his new employer...but when the climactic confrontations come, they are bland and unexciting. The movie spends a lot of time leading up to the final you-know-what hitting the fan, but when it does, all we can do is shrug "so what."

There was no really good reason to remake THE STEPFATHER. But having decided to, the filmmakers put very little effort into it. It's as though they decided that marketing should do all the work for them...they didn't actually need to make a good film. And they at least succeeded in that.

'The Stepfather' plot is quite predictable, though interesting enough to keep one's attention throughout the movie. It opens with the 'bad guy' getting dressed, then eating breakfast and stepping over the bodies of his recently murdered family. Then it's off to a new town and a new life. He meets a divorcee, moves in with her, and dodges any activities that might identify him. His stepson, however, is suspicious, as well as his fiance's sister and the former husband. Meanwhile, a neighbor sees a TV show featuring his prior crimes and becomes suspicious as well. Eventually their concerns bring confrontations, and the deaths of the former husband, neighbor, and fiance's sister. Finally the stepson finds his father's body in the basement freezer, and the bloody conclusion is on. The really bad news is that, though wounded, he escapes to repeat the horror again.

The original film THE STEPFATHER was a great little suspense film that became a huge cult classic and is at the top of the list of the career of star Terry O'Quinn. The story of a family where the mother remarries and the guy ends up becoming a psychotic killer had so many chills and thrills. Everything about it just worked. Here we have a remake of that film. There are a lot of terrible reviews here and if comparing it to the original they are indeed justified. But it can be looked at for its own merits. It's like a grade B thriller and Dylan Walsh does a pretty good job as the creepy stepfather. Certainly no O'Quinn but still good. Sela Ward adds a certain intelligent naivite to the mother and is fine. The true star of this film though is Penn Badgley as the suspicious son. It was a suspicious daughter in the original and the switch up works. The way the film is directed pretty much shows that a film of the caliber of the original wasn't really being looked for. Emphasis is on Badgley and his girlfriend. The house has a pool and both stars are attractive and we get lots of bathing suit scenes. Definitelty B horror level stuff.

But there is some suspense and surprises. If you like any of the stars you will like the film. The blu ray has excelent video with strong crispness and clarity. Colors are strong and pop with flesh tones very realistic. Black/white ration is also good. Audio works well too with dialogue strong and present and surround speakers put to good use for the chills and suspense. I am a huge fan of the original and am looking at this film for what it is. And as a light suspense film with likable stars and excellent presentation on blu ray I can recommend it. Just know what you are getting. And if you are a fan of Ward, Walsh or Penn Badgley you will enjoy passing the 90 minutes.

The Stepfather or step-anything for that matter,is for me an horrible thing.The movie is pretty good not unique.and typical of the modern day broken family with the benchmark of the usual movie antics. This guy is for real? how come there is no pictures of him?and why would anyone be married to someone so mysterious?

The Stepfather is a typically suspenseful film about a father who happens to notice a mother with two boys at a local supermarket, and immediately connects with the woman prompting the two of them to quickly get involved with each other. Soon after, the guy moves into the family's home. Little does the family know the guy has a dreaded dark history of being a psychotic killer.

Soon however, the children (an older teenage boy with college plans along with his younger brother) begin to notice something is not quite right with their new stepfather which leads to immediate confusion and questioning, and a need to look after themselves more carefully.

The build-up is pretty standard fare. The stepfather kills a few "problems" along the way, which of course temporarily upsets the family and friends... but the killing continues to take place around the house until well, you know. I don't want to spoil what eventually happens (though you probably already know without even having to WATCH it). I guess the only surprise is that the real father plays more of a role than I thought he would. He makes a few appearances. Oh, and the older brothers blonde girlfriend is the hottest girl ever, haha.

The only major problem is that the final showdown is pretty lackluster and melodramatic. Compared to, say, the Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the final scene here comes up short and feels like it's over WAY too soon.

That's about the only flaw though, because the movie delivers with the suspense for the entire 100 minutes of playtime.

So you say you wanna be a schlocky filmmaker? Step right this way...

1. Choose a lead who is woefully miscast (and if he's thoroughly outclassed by the originator of the role? Even better!).
2. Waste good actresses who shouldn't be reduced to this kind of dreck just because they're over 35 (Sela Ward and Paige Turco).
3. Make sure your teen leads are at least 28.
4. Thoroughly ignore what made the original film you're remaking memorable in the first place.
5. Tailor the environment of your characters and your plot to keep the teenage girl in her bikini.
6. Craft your suspense for audiences who have never ever ever seen any other movie.
7. Then leave the door open for that sequel, baby!

A formulaic film, that looks like it was produced on a shoe string, and where we know exactly the road it will follow. Therefore, there is little or no suspense beyond the general startle by slasher set-up. The use of a hand held jumpy camera for the slasher parts is vertigo-inducing, and several of the other scenes are dimly lit (i.e. in a dark basement where it's difficult to see.) Did not enjoy this one at all, although the "bloopers" in the special features segment were pretty funny.

I Cant understand why this movie has 6 1star ratings so far.This movie is as much of an edge of your seat thriller as the older 1st making of this movie,if not scarier.Its a good movie to add to your horror collection.