Best movie ever!

Absolutely the worst movie.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I guess when all is said and done, "The Stepfather" is really just a slasher movie. But . . . it's actually a petty damn good one. A great deal of that is the script and taut direction, but also the pacific northwest setting lends some nice eerie atmosphere. Although there's not a whole lot to say about the casting (they just function), it's Terry O'Quinn who claims this movie for his own, and he's really something to see here; a deranged realtor, moving from one fatherless family to the next until his dreams of the ideal Cleaver household are fulfilled (great satire on family values in Reagan's America). But O'Quinn shifts from calm to madness with the flick of a switch and he puts on a how-to on dominating a movie. Its a defined character with just enough hint of backstory to be real (not to mention psychotic). More importantly, he's unforgettable.7/10

Jerry Blake (Terry O'Quinn) is the perfect family man. He's all about the traditional working class "married with children" kind of life. That is, until someone in his family angers him or is basically anything less than perfect. That's when he murders them all, changes his identity, and finds a new family. He's been doing this for quite some time and has gone by many different aliases over the years. His current family consists of his wife Susan (Shelley Hack) and his stepdaughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). Everything seems to be going well until Stephanie starts dating, then Jerry decides that it's time to take out the knife and dish out his own form of brutal punishment. Then he can simply find another family under a new identity. Unfortunately for the homicidal stepfather, his former brother-in-law Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen) is hot on his trail. Jim seeks revenge against Jerry for killing his sister, and has just bought a gun ready to dish out some punishment of his own! I've always been a huge fan of this great horror film and appreciate its interesting and original premise. How can you not be intrigued by a brilliant but psychotic man who longs for the perfect family and is willing to try again and again until he gets it right? He doesn't just leave them when things go wrong, he kills them. Terry O'Quinn excels in his performance as the maniacal family man and gives a new meaning to the term "home sweet home". Jerry Blake is one of my favorite horror villains in film history and he probably would not have worked with a lesser actor. Jill Schoelen as Stephanie is a great lead character and, although I was somewhat rooting for the stepfather, I really felt for her and wanted her to come out alive at the end. The vengeful former brother-in-law subplot also had me glued to the screen, as it provided a lot of background to the stepfather character. This movie was followed by two sequels. O'Quinn returned for part 2, which was pretty good although it was basically just a rehash which brought nothing new to the table. Part 3 featured a different actor in the stepfather role, which just didn't work for me at all. I would recommend this movie for anyone who appreciates intricate and engaging horror thrillers.

What makes "The Stepfather" stand out is despite the absence of paranoia (the title character is revealed to be a killer in the opening few minutes), it remains quite effective with the plot line of the daughter trying to prove he is, and because he knows she knows, he attempts to conceal the truth.Interestingly, the death of another character is quite sad, whereas similar films only have deaths for shock value.The film also provides a subplot involving a relative of Jerry's previous family hunting him, although it raises the question of where relatives are I suppose, although that didn't detract from the movie.

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.