THE STEPFATHER (1987)

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

Tagline: Who Am I Here?

(Horror, Thriller, The Highest Birdhouse Ever Seen In a Movie) [R]

Sounds like you had a strict upbringing.

In this one, Jerry Blake has just murdered his family and decides to move across the river to start a new one. He meets a widow named Susan and automatically shacks up with her and her daughter Stephanie. It does not take long before Stephanie starts to suspect her mom just fell in love with someone who is not who he says he is. 

First off, I first saw this movie back around the time it came out. I was just a teen, so it freakin traumatized me. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Actress Jill Schoelen who plays 16-year-old Stephanie was 24 when this shot, but still had nightmares about some of the scenes she was in. She must have gotten over it because she showed up in more horror flicks after that including CUTTING CLASS, CURSE II: THE BITE and POPCORN. 

This thing doesn’t waste any time before it gets going because it starts off right after Jerry kills his family and they show him just casually cleaning up. The movie does slow down in the middle when we kind of have a lot of Stephanie’s story being expanded on. It also goes a bit into how Jerry has kind of faked his way into making everyone believe he is not only Jerry but also that he’s just a normal family man. I think they could have explored his motives more and that was included in the original script, but getting rid of that actually makes the character even more ominous than he might have been, if the audience was focusing on “oh, he’s that way because of that” rather than “I can’t wait for someone to take this clown to shallow grave town”. 

This isn’t your typical “the killer really doesn’t talk” slasher flick, but the horror level is high because it’s not that far off base if we were looking at real life. The film is loosely based on a killer who killed his family and ended up remarrying before he was caught almost 2 decades later. If we want to talk about some of the more helpful advances in technology, it’s that these days getting away with this stuff is made a LOT more difficult with forensic science and DNA matching technology. So hats off to the people that figured that stuff out. 

This is not a gore fest by any means. Instead, it relies a lot more on Terry O'Quinn’s (THE ROCKETEER) performance as Jerry which is notably haunting. Shelley Hack’s (TROLL) performance as Susan is solid, but she is off-screen more and more as the film moves along. Charles Lanyer is great as Dr. Bondurant, really the only person who seems to even care what Stephanie has to say. Lanyer is probably best known for DIE HARD 2. If we were doing a TOP 10 Horror movie guys that didn’t deserve to get killed, Dr. Bondurant would definitely be on mine. Stephen Shellen (GONE IN 60 SECONDS) plays Jim, a cop obsessed with hunting down Jerry, and does a decent, but not a great job in this. The reason he’s obsessed was actually pretty good writing. The rest of the cast is okay, but these leads all really helped this thing out. 

There are 2 morals in this movie. One is, that if your kids are freaked out about your new love interest and you were too lazy to get references and do at least a little research on them before shaking up, then you need to stop drop and roll. Like slow the heck down, check into things, and call the authorities if necessary. The other moral is that just because someone is “nice” or even fake “prays” before dinner, it doesn’t make them the greatest person alive. Lots of nice people are false in their souls. Get all the information you can. 

THE STEPFATHER is a creepy horror flick that I think is probably better for Halloween Horror-o-thons that start during the day. This would be like part of the first batch, which is on the less spooky side. This one gets a 5 out of 7. 

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