The Stepdaughter 2 (Footage Films Studios, Tubi, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Stepdaughter 2, which Lifetime showed at 8 p.m. Sunday, August 31 right after rerunning the original The Stepdaughter from its own “premiere” showing the night before (though both these movies had originally aired on the Tubi “streaming” service in 2024 and Tubi got a co-production credit along with the awkwardly named Footage Films Studios and Lifetime), established that Michael Lawrence had somehow escaped from prison and landed a job running a restaurant inside a hotel in San Diego. He’s latched onto a new pigeon, Tessa Daniel (Erica Pinkett), who owns a company called Stretch that makes spandex clothes. She’s a multibillionaire, thanks to the fortune she inherited from her late husband as well as the fortune she’s made on her own from her clothing company. As the film begins Michael, who’s using the name “Christopher Michaels,” is putting on his big seduction act and eventually she induces Tessa to marry him. Only no sooner has that happened that Michael’s psycho daughter Joanna once again turns up at their home and is up to her old tricks again. We learn that Joanna was in a coma for a month, but when she came to she murdered the doctor who’d been treating her and escaped custody by impersonating her. She insists that Michael join him in a scheme to kill Tessa for her money and make it look like an accident – until then it’s been unclear whether Michael genuinely loved Tessa and saw her as an opportunity to get off the murder treadmill and live the rest of his life decently and honestly or whether he intended her as a target from the get-go. It’s unclear whether Christopher B. Stokes, who directed, co-wrote, and co-produced The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2, ever made up his mind on that point either. Michael takes Joanna aside in his guise as “Christopher” and tells her that he’ll join in her plot to take down Tessa and grab her fortune on condition that she not try to seduce Tessa’s son Trevor (Keyon Bowman), who aside from his weaknesses in math is an honors student in high school with firm admission and scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton. Trevor is supposedly Tessa’s son by her late husband Hank, but midway through we learn that his actual biological father is Tessa’s ex Brandon.

The imdb.com page on The Stepdaughter 2 is confusing because it credits a white actor, Ken Lawson, as Brandon, but the character we see on screen is definitely Black; indeed, whoever’s playing Brandon looks so much like Blue Kimble, who’s playing Michael, that during their fight scenes it’s hard to tell which one is which. What’s more, during all this Tessa, despite being 50 years old, has got pregnant by Michael, and she wants to keep this a secret until she has a chance to tell him. Of course Joanne learns it through guile – she finds Tessa’s positive pregnancy test in her trash – and spreads the news far and wide, surprising Tessa’s girlfriends who had assumed she was past child-bearing age. Michael is overjoyed by the news that he’s going to be a father again, but Joanne cruelly reminds him that Tessa’s new baby is just one more potential heir standing between them and the Daniel fortune and therefore the only way they can inherit Tessa’s money is to kill Tessa before her baby is born. They also need to kill Trevor while they’re at it. While all this is going on we have periodic flashbacks to the characters from the first The Stepdaughter. We re-meet Whitney Hughs at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, telling the group that the stresses from the first film’s events led her first to prescription drugs and then to wine, then to hard liquor, until she hit the proverbial bottom and started to recover. We also meet two new police officer characters, Detective Hines (Mike Hill) and Detective Irving (Apryl Jones). Detective Hines is still determined to recapture Michael and Joanne Lawrence despite Detective Irving’s puzzlement that he’s so desperate to reopen this particular cold case. It turns out that Detective Hines actually dated Whitney Hughs before she married Michael Lawrence, and he’s determined not only to give her justice but to catch Michael and Joanne so he can win back Whitney’s love. Detective Hines even goes to see Whitney and offers her police protection, including an unmarked car stationed outside her door, in the unlikely event Michael ever comes to see her again. The Stepdaughter 2 has a particularly frustrating open ending in which Michael and Joanne are once again arrested, only we’re told that they’ve escaped and in the chilling final scene, Michael once again shows up at Whitney’s home and we’re left with the sinking feeling that somehow Christopher B. Stokes is setting us up for The Stepdaughter 3. (That prospect reminded me of the Los Angeles Times reviewer who wrote about the film Saw 4 and pleaded, “Don’t see this movie. Don’t give them an excuse to make Saw 5.” As things turned out, they made not only a Saw 5 but a Saw 6 before the series blessedly sawed itself out of its – and our – misery.)