The Stepfather poster. The only improvement on the original film!

So I had a little problem right off the bat going into The Stepfather. Passionate, slow-motion make-out scenes with high school kids totally creep me out, which alone might be enough to make it impossible for me to enjoy a movie like this. On the other hand, the two high school leads are played by actors in their mid-20s, so at least there’s that. The Stepfather is the latest 80s horror/thriller remake from J.S. Cardone, the same guy who brought us the dumbass remake of Prom Night last year and is now anxious to continue his efforts to convince the world that he doesn’t have a single original idea rattling around in his head.

The original Stepfather attained a cult status and featured a brilliant lead performance by Terry O’Quinn (better known now as John Locke from “Lost“)that was effective enough to warrant two sequels. Now, director Nelson McCormick has turned an almost classic thriller into standard, direct-to-video fare. Luckily it has a good cast (ok, one guy), so I guess that’s why it was released in theaters.

So here’s the plot. Dylan Walsh (who you know better as Dr. Sean MacNamara from “Nip/Tuck”) plays David Harris, a.k.a. Grady something-or-other, a man who murdered his family and then turned it into something of a habit. He’s the bad guy and eventually he gets found out. I can tell you that without ruining anything because you’ve seen the preview, so you already know he’s the bad guy. The appeal of Terry O’Qiunn’s performance in the original film was the way he appeared so friendly and normal until his family began to “disappoint” him and the rage came out. Walsh’s performance is passable, but too obvious.

The Stepfather. Not to be confused with The Lodger, another crappy thriller from earlier this year.

You will literally spend the entire movie waiting for his latest family of victims to figure out what’s going on. Sadly, if you’ve seen the trailer for The Stepfather, you’ve seen the movie. You could really save yourself some time here.

But despite the movie being almost amusingly predictable, I did like how well Dylan Walsh fit the character of the murderous step-dad. He portrays a man who fits the textbook serial killer profile perfectly; He’s good-looking, he’s charming, women love him, and he’s totally freaking nuts. Unfortunately, he’s surrounded by a cast that is just about as boring as any you could possibly assemble. His newest wife is Susan, in a thoroughly uninspired performance from Sela Ward. I somehow managed to immediately recognize her as Richard Kimble’s murdered wife from The Fugitive, but in this movie her performance is so uninspired that she’s nearly indistinguishable from her inexplicably lesbian boss.

Penn Badgley, a good-looking and clearly talented actor, is horrifically miscast as Susan’s son Michael, who is meant to be such a delinquent that he’s had to be sent to military school. Yeah, right. Badgley is a good actor and he effortlessly commands the screen, but he can’t even come close to portraying a character like that. He’s just not, you know, screwed up enough. And then, of course, there is my favorite. 23-year-old Amber Heard as Kelly, Michael’s girlfriend. Oh Lordy, Amber Heard. She’s a veteran of both Zombieland and Pineapple Express, two of the funniest movies of the last two years, but she serves not a single purpose in this film other than to run around in a bikini or her underwear, simultaneously looking incredibly sexy and intensely, almost painfully boring.

You want to be interested in seeing this cute blonde gallivanting around almost totally naked, except she’s so skinny that she’s about as sexy as a 12-year-old boy, and yet director McCormick parades her bony frame across the screen like we’re supposed to drop our jaws and drool over her angular, skeletal features.

But YOU remember my name, right Michael? Right? Honey...?

But even worse, McCormick presents her as a faceless, instantly forgettable cookie-cutter hottie, just like he did with the entire cast of Prom Night last year, where you couldn’t even remember the names of their characters after the movie ended. Don’t believe me? Well, let me remind you – her name’s Kelly. See? You forgot after a single paragraph.

The most lasting impression that the movie left me with was the feeling of how badly Hollywood’s in need of a new look. Not Hollywood itself, but the people in the movies. Maybe the single most important reason that movies look so fake is because no studios are casting real people. I don’t mean people who look like some random guy off the street (like the bad guy in Prom Night), I mean people who aren’t so obviously the result of extensive casting sessions looking for the most Beautiful People. This, coupled with horrific screenwriting, is why the movies never get high school kids right, for example. They never act right, and they never look right, they always look like nothing but a bunch of no-name actors, and The Stepfather is such a perfect example of this that it succeeds in the prodigious feat of taking actors that you do know and turning them into faceless characters. Sad.

Also like Prom Night, The Stepfather is an uninspired plodding through ancient horror clichés (yes, they even managed to squeeze in the prehistoric and invariably ineffective Screeching Cat Scare), this time even aspiring to come across as a garbled conglomeration of scenes removed straight from other movies and dropped into this one.

Michael is about to learn why you should never trust a man who has a freezer this big in his basement.

Had you the time and/or inclination, which I don’t, you could probably identify every single scene in the movie in previous, equally boring sex thrillers at your local video store. For now, I’ll just point out that the movie’s climactic scene is literally almost a shot-for-shot plagiarism of the closing scene of the original Halloween.

I might as well admit that, in general, I support modern remakes of older movies. Even though the remakes are almost never as good as the original films, I enjoy reimaginings of classic stories, and I think sometimes it’s good to bring that kind of attention back to movies that deserve more recognition. But there are times, like with The Stepfather, when the remakes are just too obviously thrown together to make money, with no interest in doing justice to the original film, much less improving on them.

The Bean Meter