A beautifully-decorated home that stands squarely in the middle of a suburban street, surrounded by a perfectly maintained white picket fence and a pristine green lawn – but beyond this depiction of the version of American domestic bliss perpetuated by Norman Rockwell and his artistic progeny, there is a much darker and more bleak reality, one that is far more difficult to embrace but yet is more likely than not going to be considered more realistic, since there is always something quite sinister about seemingly placid, suburban life. This premise forms the foundation for The Stepfather, a bizarre attempt at merging domestic melodrama with psychological thriller, in which director Joseph Ruben and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (both strong names in their respective films) tell the story of a serial killer who preys on ordinary families, immersing himself in their lives before ending them, deciding that it is far more compelling to play the long game in the hopes of not being caught. A very odd film that never quite manages to reach anything particularly notable, the film offers us exactly what it promises at the outset, and not an ounce more – and despite a lot of potential, it doesn’t take long for it to become derailed, becoming a hopelessly tacky, bizarre mess of a film that never really amounts to anything particularly compelling, choosing instead to follow the same hackneyed trajectory we often see from these pulpy, one-dimensional horror films that are less about the nuances of telling such a story, and more about seeing how far an already taut premise can be stretched before it falls apart – and apparently, it doesn’t take too much work for such a film like this to show its shortcomings, which emerge almost immediately as it progresses.
The Stepfather lays down its fundamental themes from the very beginning, where we see the titular character undergoing yet another transformation after committing a heinous crime, which he seems to escape without paying any real consequences at the time. The problem is that this film is far too hasty in establishing the core concepts, and it misses many opportunities to challenge and provoke, which is the foundation on which many intelligent horror films are built. Ruben seems to be so fearful that audiences will misinterpret the ideas that persist throughout the film that he spends almost the entire first act engaging in the most frustrating, mediocre level of exposition we can fathom, spoon-feeding us the very obvious premise that suburban life is not as blissful as it appears to be on the surface. The dangers of domesticity and the fact that it isn’t always what it seems to be is a common premise, and one that this film doesn’t execute thoroughly or in any way that comes across as anything more than hopelessly obvious. The problem here is that the ideas are strong – the topic of a serial killer infilitrating your home and making those he pledged to love and protect his next targets is chilling and uncomfortable, but only in theory, since the execution of these ideas is lacklustre at the best of times, a result of what we can consider to be the complete and utter inability to take a promising topic and allow it to evolve into something that isn’t painfully obvious at the best of time, and deeply frustrating at the worst, a balance that doesn’t quite help this film’s case as far as establishing its core narrative foundation, becoming one of the many reasons The Stepfather falls apart before it even has a chance to make its case.
A large portion of the supposed acclaim for The Stepfather comes about in terms of the lead performance, delivered by the usually wonderful Terry O’Quinn, an actor who is often able to elevate even the weakest of material. Unfortunately, this film is not much of a showcase for him, since it doesn’t possess even an ounce of meaning when it comes to defining the lead character. We’re fooled into thinking this film is going to be a layered, complex portrait of a psychopath, a glimpse into the mind of a murderer as he methodically engages in his criminal actions. This is the ideal version of this film, and naturally the one that goes completely off the rails almost immediately. What was clearly intended to be a complex character study turns out to be nothing more than an opportunity to take a normally great actor and extinguish every bit of charm or versatility, in favour of shoehorning him into the most limited, one-dimensional character we could fathom. The role has no substance, and it isn’t even interesting enough to be sinister, which we could at least understand on a conceptual level. The role is extremely limited and not at all likeable, and O’Quinn isn’t able to overcome its clear shortcomings, despite being positioned as the anchor. The rest of the cast barely fares any better – Jill Schoelen is unremarkable as the proverbial “final girl” who unearths her stepfather’s crimes, while Shelley Hack doesn’t register, despite having quite a substantial role as the woman who inadvertently lets this killer into her home. When a film is as narratively weak as this, we could at least hope the performances are good, but this is certainly not the case here, as they’re just as limited as the rest of the film.
Beyond the lacklustre performances that feel as surface-level as the rest of the film, The Stepfather struggles to achieve much as far as actually being an effective horror film. The primary problem here is that the film simply did not know what it wanted to be, and in the scramble to establish something resembling a vision, it loses whatever paltry potential it had, becoming a lacklustre mess of a film that never attains anything close to a coherent perspective or even so much as a set of narrative cues that help explain its very peculiar elements, all of which are equally confusing and difficult to embrace. Caught somewhere between a slasher and psychological horror, the film lacks any real sense of coherency in terms of either – it is structured quite poorly, with the ideas that reside at the heart of the film never quite making much sense, and the story itself being too weak to evoke much enthusiasm, leading us to wonder what the purpose of the film actually was, and whether or not it can be considered even a noble failure. It doesn’t help that The Stepfather is quite badly made on a visual level – the gritty, low-budget aesthetic isn’t even distinct enough to be notable, existing purely as a means to tell a story that was already too limited to grab our attention, let alone hold it for the duration of what is essentially nothing more than a few set pieces strung together by a heavy-handed score and over-edited series of scenes that fail to connect at even the most fundamental level. It’s a very poorly-made film, and doesn’t even have the ramshackle charm we would normally expect from these low-budget forays into the horror genre, becoming an absolute misfire not only in terms of its narrative, but also its execution.
The Stepfather is a film that works better in concept than it does in execution, and we find that it depends mostly on its reputation more than it does on anything particularly solid, which is a signal of a film that needed a lot of work to actually be even marginally effective. Mercifully, the film runs at least 90 minutes, which ensures that it doesn’t overstay its welcome (even when it feels twice as long as it actually is), which is far from ideal for a premise that had this much potential. There is very little to salvage throughout this film – it’s extremely limited in scope, lacking any clear substance as far as its narrative goes, and being just as bland in terms of the execution, following the tropes so closely that it begins to grow frustrating and borderline infuriating at the best of times. There are very few indications of why this film chose one particular approach over the other, since it seemed to be a result of laziness in choosing to go with the low-hanging fruit rather than challenging itself to be anything more than wholeheartedly mediocre. It’s a clear sign of a lack of effort and poor planning, since there is very little reason a film with such a simple premise should have been such a tonal and artistic misfire, becoming so profoundly annoying that we have to wonder whether or not it is actually worthy of our time- one of the bleakest reactions we can have to a piece of art- and a clear indication of the conceptual and creative poverty that defined such a film.
