Pluskylang Great Film overall

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Toronto85 A serial killer who is in love with the idea of a "perfect family" preys on the Maine family in 'The Stepfather'. The film starts with us seeing Terry Quinn's character changing his appearance and leaving his family home after brutally butchering them. We fast forward some time later to him now going by the name of Jerry Blake, he's got a wife named Susan and is the stepfather to our lead character Stephanie. Stephanie can't stand him and suspects there is more to him than meets the eye. She begins investigating into the murder he committed a year prior, and it isn't long before he catches on. Others begin questioning him as well, and his former brother-in-law from the family he killed is on the hunt for him. With the walls closing in, Jerry beings to crack... and begins to kill.'The Stepfather' is a brilliant late eighties thriller! I first came across it years back when TBS used to show a marathon of the Stepfather series on a regular basis. It's a basic story of a madman, but the performances by the actors involved takes it to another level. Terry Quinn is amazing as the psychotic Jerry Blake, just his mannerisms when he's having his meltdowns are spot on. Jill Schoelen, who became a late eighties scream queen, did a terrific job as the lead female character. And Shelley Hack put in a good performance as Stephanie's mom Susan, the woman he gave into the charms of Jerry. There are some death scenes, some pretty brutal, but the intensity comes from watching Jerry Blake crack under the pressure. Not knowing when he'll snap leaves viewers on the edge of their seats, and when he finally does snap towards the end of the film ... things get scary. Highly recommended.8/10

Spikeopath The Stepfather is directed by Joseph Ruben and collectively written by Carolyn Lefcourt, Brian Garfield and Donald E. Westlake. It stars Terry O'Quinn, Jill Schoelen, Shelley Hack, Stephen Shellen and Charles Lanyer. Music is by Patrick Moraz and cinematography by John W. Lindley.Why can't they leave me alone? Joseph Ruben's film is firmly ensconced in the land of B horror cultdom, and rightly so. Some horror fans may be disappointed at the lack of brutal killings actually shown on screen, but looking beyond that expectation there beats the heart of a cynical picture. The American Dream shed of its bloody veneer, the film plants an ambiguous serial killer in the normalcy of the family life that he so craves, that is until his vision of Americana family life is not met and his dark half comes to the fore.It's a cunning picture, keeping the killer's back story shaded in grey, and Ruben smartly keeps tension simmering away to keep viewers anxiously waiting for the stepfather to crack. O'Quinn is excellent as damaged dad, intense, measured and charmingly normal when required, and then not over the top when he cracks and rants. Around him he is backed by strong turns from Schoelen, Hack and Lanyer, while Ruben's direction and Lindley's colour photography bring a credible feeling to the plot.A running sub-plot involving Shellen's grieving brother doing detective work feels a bit superfluous at times, while a nude shower scene with Schoelen is totally unnecessary. Don't get me wrong, Schoelen has a lovely body and is a very pretty girl, the actress aged 24 at the time, but she's playing a 16 year old! It just comes off as pointless titillation in a film that didn't need such tricks. Small irritants aside, The Stepfather is intelligent horror and still holding up now in this age of torture and hackville sub-genres. 7.5/10

Paul Andrews The Stepfather starts as a man named Henry Morrison (Terry O'Quinn) leaves his home for the last time, a home in which his wife & children lie dead after he had killed them earlier. After travelling to a new town he now calls himself Jerry Blake & has found a new job as a real estate agent, Jerry has also found himself a new family. Jerry has married widow Susan Maine (Shelley Hack) but is having problems with her daughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen) who resents Jerry & even has an intense dislike of him. After reading about the murdered family in a nearby town Stephanie becomes suspicious, especially after witnessing Jerry lose his temper on several occasions & decides to investigate further. Jerry becomes aware of Stephanie's suspicions & starts to realise that his 'perfect' family is falling apart, eventually Jerry decides he has to start again fresh & that he has to dispose of his current disappointing family...This British & American co-production was directed by Joseph Ruben & seems to be considered a bit of a classic in some circles, I must admit that I have no idea why & thought The Stepfather was a throughly average film. It's quite hard to define The Stepfather within the confines of one genre, I was expecting a slasher style horror film but The Stepfather is probably more a psycho thriller in the vein of Fatal Attraction (1987) which was released the same year. Like it's big budget Hollywood blockbuster The Stepfather hinges on family values & just how important they are to us, in the case of Jerry Blake he will literally kill for the perfect family & the idyllic existence that we are all brought up to aspire to, while Fatal Attraction places emphasis on it's family life with Michael Douglas doing all he can to salvage it & that it should be cherished & respected The Stepfather goes in the other direction & weaves it's story around the idea that family values are outdated & the perfect family simply does not exist & trying to attain it will only end in tears & misery. While the two films take opposite opinions I think the truth lies somewhere between the two, there's nothing wrong with traditional family life but at the same time it's near impossible for things to be completely perfect. At just over 80 minutes long The Stepfather moves along at a fairly sedate pace, while it's not boring it's hardly exciting either. The character's are alright if a little dumb at times & there's a real lack of slasher conventions until the final ten minutes in which we get a knife wielding maniac, a gratuitous shower scene & a final girl who defeats the bad guy after a chase. The Stepfather is competently written, plotted & it's alright to watch but I don't really understand the great reputation it has, I thought it was strictly average & I wouldn't want to see it again any time soon.The Stepfather looks alright, it has no great visual style but it's well made I suppose. Those looking for gore & novelty killings should stick with the likes of The Nightmare on Elm Street & Friday the 13th franchises & there's very little here. A guy is beaten with a plank of wood, a couple of dead bodies are seen, someone is shot & stabbed in the arm & that's about it. The script was apparently based loosely on the case of John List who killed in family in 1971 & remained on the run until 1989.Supposedly filmed in 40 days in Washington & in British Columbia in Canada on what must have been a fairly low budget The Stepfather has good production values. The acting is alright, I keep reading how great Terry O'Quinn is in the role but I was less impressed, sure he's fine but I didn't enjoyed his performance particularly.The Stepfather is a film with a great reputation & strong following but I must admit to being somewhat baffled by what people see in it, sure it's not terrible but I didn't think it was anything great either. Followed by Stepfather II (1989), Stepfather III (1992) & a more recent Hollywood remake The Stepfather (2009).

chaos-rampant Before 1960, horror generally beckoned from places unmapped, from a little outside the common sphere of rationale and knowledge. We either traveled to them as in the Dracula mythos or as in Cat People their curse seeped back, nevertheless the boundaries were well defined. Here was home, where fear may occasionally intrude but is nevertheless dispelled by some understanding of its supernatural mechanism, and beyond was the unspeakable. Even when that unspeakable was found in the suburbs of Los Angeles, as in the case of House on Haunted Hill, the otherworldly architecture was a clear signifier of the threshold that separates the two worlds.Psycho changed all that. Now the dark, threatening world was a short drive away and the monster was the motel owner next door - meaning it's never quite dispelled, and could be each of us next. The vision was so startling it turned Gothic horror overnight into a semi-parodic anachronism. Eight years later Romero carried the idea to its revealing extreme - now the fabric of the world entire was chaos pulling at the seams and we were forced to barricade inside the mind. The idea was no longer to restore balance and eventually make good triumph, rather to simply survive and maintain sanity in spite of the terror. It resonated with people growing up in a world of random, inexplicable yet sensationalized violence close and far from home, whose true essence is so hopelessly removed from our immediate understanding that we can merely fumble in the dark as we retreat from it. In its own way, it situated us back into the spooky castle or mansion, only now there was nowhere to hide from it - the entire world is the monster's den.Now, The Stepfather goes the extra mile from Psycho. The monster is not simply disguised among us, it is the very figurehead of the household who is furthermore responsible for upholding the values that define social life. The ogre-father in Freudian terms, but also as arbiter of ethos. It is to some degree a successful venture for the reversal alone.Why it's not important in the grand scheme as Psycho or Night of the Living Dead, perhaps has to do with so much contrivance in the plotting. It's never quite so believable as it should be. And it's played with so much relish that the closest film I kept thinking of was not so much Psycho, as American Psycho. The psychotic person so peculiarly enjoyable in his frenzy that it's rendered a parody of the real thing. An Ed Gein who has seeped so deep into the cultural mainstream that he has been allowed, in part, to be deprived of the reality that could foster such a human being. It doesn't so much scare or scar with life, as passingly titillate.And it's so parodic I think, because audiences by now were so accustomed to the very idea of a father menacing his own family that it doesn't move like it might have at one time. It is acceptable to be the subject of gleeful fun. Slashers and zombie films followed the same path, becoming increasingly ironic of the terror they posited. Having made our peace with it, we could now make some fun of what is beyond the pale.It is not a bad film by any means. It could have been much more though. Watch it, if you've done the rounds of the genre and are now looking into the second-tier.