The Stepfather (1987)

The Stepfather (1987)

Directed by Joseph Reuben

Despite collecting positive reviews, director Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather was a box office flop, lost among the flood of slasher films saturating the market at the time. Still, the film managed to garner a small cult following, which has increased since its home video release.

The Stepfather works for one reason: it’s an exercise in despair framed as the portrait of a tragic man.  Meet Jerry Blake, brilliantly portrayed by Lost‘s  Terry O’Quinn. Jerry’s the new guy in town, and has all the makings of a perfect friend, perfect neighbor, perfect boyfriend and even a perfect husband. But looks can be deceiving, as Jerry is really a homicidal maniac. He moves from town to town, marrying into a family and then wiping it out when it inevitably fails to live up to his Leave it to Beaver ideal.

O’Quinn is well cast as the classically elegant and polite villain, his performance easily keeping the movie afloat. Perfectly balancing the normalcy and insanity of the character, O’Quinn easily transforms from a neighborly real estate salesman to a homicidal crackpot in the blink of an eye. His monster is an all-American killer reminiscent of Robert Mitchum’s preacher in The Night of the Hunter and Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. O’Quinn carries the film with conviction from start to finish, from the beautifully orchestrated opening sequence in which Blake goes about his morning ritual amidst the corpses littering his home to the final moments in which he bursts through the washroom door like The Shining‘s Jack Torrance.

At times, The Stepfather can be clever and well-executed, but it does have far too many plot holes and loose ends to truly succeed. Though it’s got the just the right amount of suspense in the right moments, it lacks true scares, and the pacing is slow. For gorehounds, there are the occasional bursts of graphic violence, but those scenes are few and far between.

On some level, the film does succeed as a psychological thriller, borrowing heavily from Hitchcock, Kubrick, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Unlike many other slashers, the focus of the film is distributed equally between the antagonists and protagonists. Victims are never painted as deserving of punishment (for social or sexual deviance, for example) and the killer never reveals a reason for his crimes. Instead, we get an engrossing suspense thriller that, through the examination of a psychopath, comments on suburbia, the instability and confusion felt by adolescents confronted with divorce, the whole retro notion of the 1980s as the new 1950′s, and other traditional “father knows best” family values. It’s not enough to make the film timeless, but it does make for an above-average slasher.