by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime feature — blessedly returning the
channel to the “pussies in peril” (Maureen Dowd’s term) thrillers they show the
rest of the year instead of the treacly holiday fare they give forth with in
late November and most of December — was The Stepfather, a 2009 made-for-TV remake of a 1987 big-screen
thriller of the same title that turned out to be surprisingly good. The film
starts with a man packing his bags to leave his home on an extended trip,
making himself a cup of coffee and a slice of toast he leaves way too long in the toaster (until he put peanut butter
on it he reminded me of me!) after he’s shaved off his beard, and calmly
leaving the place. We see that the license plate on his car identifies the
locale as Utah, just after we get a pan shot of his living room to see a woman
and three children all massacred therein. The Salt Lake City cops who get the
call on this macabre crime scene note that the killer, whoever he might have
been, left no clues as to his identity and made sure to wipe everything down so
he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. Since the victims were a recently widowed woman
and the three children she’d had with her late husband (only three? In Utah?), the woman detective in charge of the
investigation deduces that they have a psycho serial killer on their hands and
unless they catch him within 48 hours, he could end up anywhere. “Anywhere”
turns out to be Portland, Oregon (once again director Nelson McCormick gives us
a shot of a license plate to tell us what state we’re in), where said killer,
using the name David Harris (Dylan Walsh), stages a meet-cute in a supermarket
with his latest victim, recently separated mom Susan Harding (Sela Ward, whose
performance was criticized by an imdb.com user reviewer but whose dorky acting
makes the character’s absurd naïveté
believable). Susan falls head over heels in love with him from the get-go but
his kids are somewhat less impressed with their new potential stepdad —
especially since their real father, Jay Harding (Jon Tenney), is still very
much in the picture, enjoying regular visitation rights before he tears off on
one of the many out-of-town trips he takes for his job, though precisely what he does for a living isn’t specified in the script
by J. S. Cardone (adapting the earlier screenplay by Donald E. Westlake, a
writer of suspense novels with some at least semi-major credits to his name).
Susan’s and Jay’s eldest son Michael (Penn Badgley, a cast member of Gossip
Girl and the boyfriend of Miley Cyrus, Zoe
Kravitz and his Gossip Girl
co-star Blake Lively before he ended up marrying someone named Domino Kirke in
February 2017) is the immediate recipient of David’s most obvious attempts at
male bonding — David offers Michael a glass of tequila he keeps hidden in a
locked cabinet in the Hardings’ basement (the Hardings’ home has so many secret
passages leading to both an attic and a basement one wonders if one of the
former art directors for Universal’s horror classics was its architect) — but
Michael is immediately suspicious of him. So is Susan’s youngest child, son
Sean (Braeden Lemasters), who understandably complains to dad when David,
responding to Susan’s request that Sean turn the volume of his video game down,
enters Sean’s room and literally grabs the controller for the game out of his
hand. Jay responds by bursting in the home when he’s there to pick up Sean and
the middle child, sister Beth (Skyler Samuels), for his weekend with them and
telling David that he’ll kill him if David ever lays hands on one of his kids
again. Michael asks Jay to check out David’s background and David responds by
overpowering Jay, dragging him down to the basement — lined with secret
compartments in which David presumably keeps all manner of sinister objects
that might link him to his past — knocking him out with a crystal bowl (which,
ironically, was a wedding present to the Hardings from Jay’s sister way back
when) and then tying a plastic bag over his head, killing him. In one of the
movie’s many unusually macabre (at least for a Lifetime movie) moments, he’s
doing this just as Michael is asking if he can come to the basement and David
is putting him off with various excuses.
David also kills Mrs. Cutter (Nancy
Linehan Charles), an elderly local neighbor lady who keeps a lot of cats (to
which Susan is intensely allergic, though the script makes surprisingly little
of that plot point) because she’s gone onto the Web site of America’s
Most Wanted and identified him as Grady
Edwards, the suspect in those family murders back in Utah (ya remember those
family murders back in Utah?), and while he
leaves Mrs. Cutter’s body to be discovered by her niece two days later and her
death written off as an accident, he stuffs Jay’s into a big white freezer in
the basement in which he also keeps more normal, less sinister frozen goods.
Michael and his girlfriend, Kelly Porter (Amber Heard) — whom we mostly meet
clad either in a white T-shirt and white panties or a bikini, the better for
the delectation of any straight guys who might be watching this (just as this
old Gay guy was having a lot of fun watching Penn Badgley play most of his role
wearing nothing but bathing shorts, and when the knives came out literally
at the end my main concern was he might get
slashed and end up with a scar across that beautiful smooth chest of his, with
enviably well-defined nipples, he’d been showing off all movie!) — get into
arguments because she wants them to fill out college applications together
(they’ve known each other since grade school and sort of slipped into a
potentially sexual relationship and she wants them to go to college together)
while all he wants to do is investigate this strange man who’s horned (in both
senses, though darnit we don’t
get any soft-core porn scenes between Dylan Walsh and Sela Ward) in on his mom.
David has tried to cover by using Jay’s cell phone to send Michael text
messages allegedly from his dad (who’s actually dead in the Hardings’ big
freezer) saying that he’s checked out David and David is O.K. There’s also a
friend of Susan’s named Jackie Kerns (Paige Turco) who briefly hired David as a
real-estate salesperson, only he abruptly quit when she insisted that he had to
provide identification documents for tax purposes and to establish who he was
so he could legally work. She meets the same fate that befalls anyone else who
gets suspicious of David; he comes over to her house one night and drowns her
in her own swimming pool. The big climax occurs at the Hardings’ home, once
Michael has discovered first his dad’s attaché case in one of David’s secret
storage lockers, then dad himself in the freezer, and David gives Susan a
sleeping pill so he can do her in without her being able to fight back, only
she fights off the effects of it well enough that she stabs David in the neck
just as he’s about to kill Michael, and in the end Michael and the wounded
David end up in a fight to the death on the house’s roof, all this taking place
in a driving rainstorm, and at the end both fall off. Matthew ends up in a coma
with mom and his girlfriend Kelly (ya remember his girlfriend Kelly?) nursing him back to health and consciousness, but
the final scene is one of those irritating the-villain-gets-away-with-it tags
that were innovative and shocking on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV shows in the 1950’s but now are just annoying:
David a.k.a. Grady, now calling himself “Chris Ames,” is in another city,
cruising a grocery store (doesn’t he meet his potential victims anywhere
else?), when he comes across another young woman, widowed and with her late
husband’s kids …
The Stepfather is
actually one of the better Lifetime movies — its theatrical-film pedigree may
help here (especially given that we
know from the get-go that David is a killer — Westlake and Cardone didn’t play
coy and have us think he’s a nice guy for the first few acts — and the violent
scenes have an over-the-top Gothic quality rare in a Lifetime film) and so may
the fact that it was still 2009 and the conventions of the Lifetime movie
hadn’t yet hardened into the predictable clichés they’ve become now. It does suffer somewhat from the fact that the three central
male characters look an awful lot alike — it’s nice that the actor playing Michael’s father looks enough
like him that it’s believable they’re father and son, but Jon Tenney looks
enough like a slightly larger, more rugged version of Dylan Walsh it’s not easy
to tell them apart until the script dispatches Tenney’s character about a third
of the way through. Still, The Stepfather is an entertaining thriller diversion (and not just for the frequent glimpses of Penn Badgley’s almost
unclad bod!) that maintains suspense and excitement all the way while at the
same time making David a villain of such precision one wonders how on earth
they’re going to triumph over him!
