Nice guy (Terry O'Quinn) gets married to lovely wife (Shelley Hack) and her rebellious daughter (Jill Schoelen). He wants his family to be like "The Brady Bunch" or "Father Knows Best". However when his family doesn't live up to his expectations he brutally kills them, changes his identity and moves on to find another unmarried woman with kids. And he's getting tired of Hack and Schoelen...

Exceptional thriller. O'Quinn gives a top-notch performance as the killer. He's helped by a very intricate script. Those two combined make you understand why he kills and plays with your emotions--I found myself actually liking the guy (for a while). There isn't a lot of violence in this, but when it appears it's very sudden, extremely bloody and shocking.

The only liabilities here are Hack and Schoelen--they're pretty bad in their roles. But O'Quinn and the script more than make up for them.

A sadly forgotten thriller from the late 80s. Well worth catching.

Occasionally a low-budget B-movie style film will break ranks and become a minor hit. This can be said of THE STEPFATHER, a film made in the late #80s craze for horror-at-home style thrillers which bombarded the box office, including amongst their rank fare such as FATAL ATTRACTION. Where THE STEPFATHER succeeds is in a script which prefers subtlety over in-your-face blood and guts shocks, and a story which doesn't spoon-feed the audience and remains tight and complex. Running at just over eighty minutes, every scene is designed to further the plot in some way making for a very satisfying experience, with plot development occurring all the time so it stays interesting.

The film also benefits from a career-best turn from the widely unrecognised Terry O'Quinn, who played a number of stereotypical bad-guy roles back around this period but who never got the recognition he deserved perhaps in light of this movie. O'Quinn is magnificent as the friendly, mild-mannered family guy who also happens to be a psychotic killer on occasion and the scenes in which he loses his cool are riveting. It's amazing the abrupt turn O'Quinn makes from being a seemingly peace-loving father one moment to a knife-wielding psychopath the next, very cold and chilling. The supporting cast is also a good one, with the other actors and actresses giving wisely subdued performances in order to make room for O'Quinn. Particularly good are Jill Schoelen as the curious stepdaughter who discovers the truth and Stephen Shellen as the hunter out for revenge. Only Shelley Hack is underused (and barely seen) as the wife who doesn't realise anything.

The film isn't gory but then it shouldn't be: another strength of THE STEPFATHER is the realism of it, and lots of splashing blood would have dissolved the atmosphere it builds up. I liked the strong characterisation and the psychology behind O'Quinn's warped persona which is scarily understandable and the tight script which leaves no room for plot holes. THE STEPFATHER is a breath of fresh air in a stale genre, an offbeat and unpredictable movie which grips from beginning to end and focuses on the human mind as a source of horror instead of a silly scaly monster, thus making the terrors "closer to home" as it were.

Jill Schoelen's father died a couple of years ago. Mother Shelley Hack married Terry O'Quinn, but despite his obvious love of being a family man, she cannot accept the new order of things. Perhaps this is because she senses he butchered his last family.

I'm a great fan of Donald Westlake, who wrote the script for this movie, but it looks like just another slasher flick to me. Perhaps Westlake is too versatile a writer, having at times written mysteries, humor, science fiction, pornography, adventure novels and the sublime KAHAWA, which combines all these genres. When he set out to write a slasher novel, inspired by his own stepdaughter's issues -- this must have been an encouraging movie for her --he did exactly that. Everyone seems competent, but you can predict the final sequence two minutes int the movie, as well as many of the other scenes.