The Stepfather (1987)

In anticipation of Sunday night's big LOST finale event, I thought I'd go retrospective for a little bit and look at one of Terry O'Quinn's older roles. Having loved The Man Who Would Be Locke (and also UnLocke) in Alias and The Rocketeer, I realized I was long overdue for The Stepfather, probably his highest profile role before coming to that infamous island.

Recently remade with Dylan Walsh (a remake now on my radar), The Stepfather is perhaps best described as a Lifetime movie that acquired sentience and decided to become a mildly satirical horror picture instead. O'Quinn stars as Jerry Baker, the perfect father with the perfect family - a wife (Shelley Hack) and a stepdaughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). It seems like the perfect life because it's Jerry's second attempt; he murdered his previous family when they "disappointed" him but managed to elude police. As Jerry's former brother-in-law closes in on him, Stephanie starts to grow wise to the fact that her stepfather isn't as perfect as he seems.

The premise is, twenty years hence, nothing remarkably fresh (2009 remake notwithstanding). But the script by Donald E. Westlake is at least marginally clever, and it gives O'Quinn a lot of room to really get into Jerry Baker's mental landscape and wreak some gleeful havoc while doing so. The rest of the film is fairly fluffy, and O'Quinn is the only element of the film that doesn't fall into some banal horror film trope. We have the unwitting spouse, the suspicious child who lacks credibility, the helpful doctor who meets a grisly fate, the driven hunter character, the family pet, the gullible next victim, and the one-liners.

Oh, the one-liners. It's here that Westlake's script really has fun with itself, as does O'Quinn. The gags - "I really don't think this house is for you" or "You should call before you drop by next time" - seem corny and overplayed, but the fact that they only appear when Jerry is at his most deranged suggests a commentary on the terrain of horror pictures. There is real horror bubbling under the surface of everyday life, the movie suggests, but Hollywood handles it by laughing at it. Jerry loses a lot of his menace when we're laughing at him; that's why he's much spookier in the "Who am I here?" scene, in which his mingle-mangle of identities begins to catch up with him.

O'Quinn's performance aside, the film is pretty terrible. The other performances just don't measure up, the plot relies on several coincidences that stretch the definition of the very term "coincidence," and the film is on the whole extremely formulaic. If it weren't for O'Quinn's presence and the strength of his performance - really a joy to watch - I'd relegate this one to the discount bin with all the other horror duds (like Prey, some horror movie [which I didn't see all of, admittedly] about lions menacing tourists in Africa. Oy.).
Rated R, The Stepfather comes from an era before the MPAA began justifying their ratings. The film includes some shockingly gory violence, one or two uses of the F-bomb, and two quick scenes of (unnecessary) nudity, both rear and frontal.