Country: United States
Genre: Suspense/ Comedy/ Horror
Director: Joseph Ruben
Year: 1987
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
There are two factors that edge The Stepfather over into greatness: one of the wittiest suspense scripts ever written, courtesy of novelist Donald Westlake, and a stunning performance by Terry O’Quinn as the title loony.
You see, Jerry Blake (Terry O’Quinn) is driven to try to create a perfect family out of 50’s era media fragments, from shows like Father Knows Best and Mr. Ed. He marries into families with a divorced or widowed mother and then, when these new families inevitably disappoint him, he slaughters them.
Terry O’Quinn captures every last twitch and nuance of this psycho. But then again, he had a brilliant script to work with. Screenwriter Donald Westlake aces every challenge. The script is littered with laugh lines, but they always grow out of character. One of Westlake’s master strokes is the use of a hackneyed parallel story line. You see, the mother in the last slaughtered family had a brother, who is now playing amateur sleuth. It’s a race against time — will the brother find the new family before Jerry gets tired of them? But it doesn’t play out quite the way you would think.
Over and over again, Westlake subverts expectations and gives you something more suspenseful and amusing than what you had been expecting. The twists and turns of the story are ruthlessly logical and the script is tight as a gnat’s ass.
O’Quinn and Westlake may be the stars of the show, but there is more good work here. Jill Schoelen is properly sympathetic as the daugher, Stephanie Maine, who has a flawless bullshit detector. Charles Lanyer has a sly way with a line as Dr. Bondurant, Stephanie’s shrink. He has a fantastic scene with O’Quinn that’s both laugh out loud funny and horrifying. Shelley Hack is fine as Susan, the mother.
Director Joseph Ruben starts out a little on the clumsy side, but he improves as the movie goes along. The most important thing he gets right is the pacing, with the aid of editor George Bowers. With such a brilliant script, all Ruben had to do was not ruin it, and he doesn’t.
Probably the worst aspect of the movie is the music, by pop musician Patrick Moraz. The opening theme is thuddingly obvious horror, when a more subtle approach or even silence would have been more effective. Fortunately, the music improves somewhat as the movie continues, and the script and Terry O’Quinn’s performance are so spectacular that the score ultimately proves to be a non-issue.
The Stepfather is a wonderfully comic suspense thriller — fun for the whole family (okay, maybe not little kids)!
