Click to play videoCast: Dylan Walsh, Sela Ward, Penn Badgley
Director: Nelson McCormick
What would you do if the man who's about to marry your newly divorced mother turns out to be a creepy, suspicious fellow that no one but your mother seems to trust?
That's the question at the heart of this week's new Hollywood release The Stepfather, a predictable old-fashioned thriller about a serial killer who hunts down unsuspecting single mothers, marries them, and eventually slaughters the whole family when they disappoint him.
Dylan Walsh stars as the homicidal maniac David, who's moved in with his latest victim Susan (played by Sela Ward) and her two young kids. She suspects nothing, but when her older son Michael (played by Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley) returns home from military school, he's convinced something's not quite right here.
Remake of a 1987 B-movie in which the killer protagonist is firmly established as a man who blows his top when he realizes that each new family he joins can't live up to his perfect dreams of wholesome domestic bliss, this new version paints him as a cold, soulless murderer pretty much from the opening credits sequence itself. Walsh volunteers a one-note performance as the psychopath; he fails mostly to bring a menacing sense of doom to his scenes. You get a few modern plot gimmicks involving mobile phones and the Internet, but what's missing here is any real logic.
Think of it as a strictly time-pass watch with no real thrills, including a lame climax in an attic that's falling apart. Obviously the filmmakers realized their film packs barely any punches, and decided the only way to compensate for that is by throwing in lots of gratuitous shots of the buff Penn Badgley and his sexy girlfriend making out in his bedroom and in the pool dressed in nothing but tiny bathing suits.
A generous two out of five for The Stepfather. Watch it if you have nothing better to do.
Rating: 2 / 5
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