Michael's Thriller Lase-O-Rama: The Stepfather (1987, Embassy Home Entertainment)

Source: LDDB.com

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Partly because it's been a while since I did a Lase-O-Rama, but also because I'm pushing @namiks's new Discord community and curation trail for #film and #movie content on Steemit, I decided it was time to make @janenightshade's eyes roll. So here I've fired up the ol' LaserDisc player -- the supreme cinephile format to which all other formats must bow (did you hear her eyes roll just now?) -- to spin a recent acquisition to the collection hoard: this 1987 thriller from writer Donald Westlake and director Joseph Ruben (who, as the director of The Good Son and Sleeping With the Enemy, clearly loves his movies about messed-up familial relations) about a guy who only wants to find the perfect family so he can be the perfect family man, but just can't find anyone to live up to his expectations.

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Perennial weird television show alumnus Terry O'Quinn (The X-Files, Lost, Millennium, Harsh Realm, etc...) plays Jerry Blake, a real estate agent with a new family and an old secret. Before he was Jerry Blake, he was Henry Morrison. Henry Morrison did a bad, bad thing: early one morning he decided his family just wasn't working out to his satisfaction.

So he killed them.

The consummate family man with a positive attitude on life and limitless love to bestow on those worthy of it, his wife and children didn't see it coming. After butchering them, he calmly took a shower, dressed for work, changed his appearance, changed his name, and walked out the front door into a new life, whistling all the way.

Now he's found a new place to live, a new wife in recently-widowed Susan Maine (Shelley Hack), and a new child in Susan's troubled daughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). Susan feels like she's won the lottery when she meets the handsome, charismatic, passionate Jerry. Unfortunately, Stephanie doesn't share her optimistic appraisal of the situation as she's still trying to deal with the death of her father.

It doesn't help that Jerry seems too perfect to her: he buys a puppy, is never anything less than complimentary and cordial with her, drives her to and from her weekly meetings with her counselor, and barely bats an eyelash when she's expelled from her high school. In fact, a few days after the expulsion from Oakridge, when Stephanie mentions she'd like to attend a boarding school, he sweet-talks the principal into giving her one more chance. Why, she asks herself, is Jerry so ferociously dead-set on keeping her around?

What's more disturbing is what Jerry does down in the basement when no one else is around: yelling, flailing, and smashing things in a rage. Sensing all is not what it appears to be with Jerry, Stephanie tries to tell her mom, her best friend, and even her counselor that there's something wrong with her stepfather, but of course no one believes her. She's a teenager, after all, still distraught after her father's death, unaware of how the real world operates.

The police, in the meantime, have closed the book on investigating the Henry Morrison killings. They know Morrison murdered his entire family, but all they could find digging into him and his past were a slew of dead-ends: his fingerprints aren't on file, he'd quit his job three weeks before the killings despite sticking to his daily routine, and vanished without a trace after the deed was done. His high level of planning and ability to disappear and re-assume his life elsewhere points to Morrison having done this before. With no leads, the cops have nothing to go on.

That isn't stopping Jim Ogilvie, though. Brother of the woman Henry Morrison called his wife, Ogilvie is one a one-man crusade to find the guy who butchered his sister before some other family falls prey to his charms and lets Morrison into their lives. Unfortunately for Ogilvie, it's already happened. The only question now is whether he, or anyone else, can find Morrison/Blake and stop him before he unleashes another whirlwind of destruction and walks away in blissful anonymity in search of another perfect little wife, perfect little house, and perfect little children to call his own.

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The tagline on The Stepfather's theatrical poster reads, "Who am I here?", and I honestly couldn't think of a better phrase to sum up this film. Terry O'Quinn's portrayal of Morrison/Blake has to be seen to be believed, as this role demands an incredible devotion to the acting craft. His ability to switch emotions on the fly, to flip anger on and off at will, to glide between the different parts his character is playing in his own mind, is a marvel to behold, on par with Alan Rickman's performance in Closet Land. This is the sort of performance that cements a legacy, and yet a trip to his IMDB page shows that even after the praise heaped upon him for this role, he remained mainly a television actor, guest-starring in shows like Moonlighting, Jake and the Fat Man, and L.A. Law, when he wasn't doing made-for-television features or landing supporting roles in movies like The Young Guns and Primal Fear.

While O'Quinn's performance is one for the ages, I have to (mostly) agree with Roger Ebert's assessment that it's really the only memorable part of the film. The Stepfather isn't a bad movie, it just isn't a great one. The story's fine (Westlake based Stephanie's character on that of his own stepdaughter, with whom he was having trouble getting along at the time he penned the screenplay), the other actors are mostly fine though Stephen Shellen's frantically-obsessed Ogilvie could stand to turn it down a notch, and everything basically works as intended. It all just feels like The Stepfather was content to hit a double instead of swinging for the cheap seats and the home run it could have been. A lot of this, I have to think, was due to the budget -- I can't find exact numbers on what it cost to make, it just has one of those "made for TV" feels to it, despite being screened at the box office. The fact it spawned two sequels on just over $2 million in receipts tells me it couldn't have been that expensive and far exceeded expectations.

My divergence with Ebert's opinion about O'Quinn being the only memorable part of the picture, however, is in regards to Jill Schoelen's portrayal of Stephanie. Ebert doesn't bring it up, but having been part of a family where I was being raised by a single mother after the death of my father, attending counseling sessions, and going through times when my mom dated (though she ultimately never remarried), I felt a strong degree of empathy for Stephanie. Her feelings mirrored many of my own, and I think it's hard, especially for a younger actor, to deliver that sense of 'I'm standing alone against the world' without devolving into melodrama. Neve Campbell pulled it off in Scream, and Jill Schoelen pulls it off in The Stepfather. I was very impressed.

If there's anything else surprising in The Stepfather, it's got to be the nudity. There's very little of it, just a few seconds all told, but the opening scene features O'Quinn stripping down to enter the shower after the unforeseen bloodbath, and there are a few frames where it's obvious he went the Full Monty on set. Male frontal nudity, especially in a film from the 80's, is exceedingly rare even in short bursts, so seeing it here was entirely unexpected. Sure, it's a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, but I still feel I'd be remiss in this review if I didn't point it out.

The other surprising scene comes towards the end of the movie, where Jill Schoelen likewise disrobes to step into the shower. This scene is blocked and shot in a way nearly identical to O'Quinn's from the film's beginning, but it's a reversal of that scene as well. When Henry Morrison steps into his shower, the blood has all been shed and the mayhem is concluded. Stephanie Maine's ablutions, by contrast, are a lead-in to the film's climax where the mayhem has begun and the bloodshed is forthcoming. It's surprising not because female nudity is shocking in a thriller, but because Stephanie's supposed to be sixteen years old. Schoelen was twenty-three at the time, so we're not in Brooke Shields territory here, but it's still unexpected after the audience has been told her character is under-age. Again, we're talking about a few brief seconds here, so it's not like Ruben is lingering or leering at either her or O'Quinn, both are completely unexpected and yet somehow fitting in a way cinematic nudity often isn't.

On the downside, I really wish we could have gotten more back-story on what happened to Henry Morrison/Jerry Blake/whoever he really is to help us understand what made him the way he is. The scene in the basement, where his breakdown is witnessed by Stephanie, gives us some clues as his personality seems to fragment and argue between adult and child personas, possibly channeling his own father and a strict, abusive upbringing. It's alluded to, but that's all. I don't need to be spoon-fed answers, but clearly something happened to this guy, and I feel like there was a missed opportunity here to provide a little sympathy for the devil. As it stands, we as the audience are totally rooting for Ogilvie to find him, for the police to catch him, for Stephanie and his family to figure out the truth, but that's what we should be doing, and there's no reason for us to even consider anything else. That's really a missed opportunity, but with that hour-and-a-half run time, there's not much room to explore it either.

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As I understand it, Westlake based the character of Jerry Blake on a real-life killer named John List. List lost his job as vice-president of a bank, but never told his family, and spent his days seeking employment while his wife, mother, and kids all assumed he was heading into work. Unable to secure a job, he purchased a World War II-era pistol from a souvenir shop in 1971, then used it to kill everyone in his home. After tidying up the house (because he was a compulsive neat freak), List told his neighbors and school his children attended that the family was leaving for a while to take care of a sick relative. He stopped the mail, emptied his bank account, locked the door behind him, and disappeared. It took the police eighteen years to finally track him down from New Jersey to Colorado to finally Virginia, where he lived under an alias, having married a woman who no doubt spent the rest of her life in therapy after learning who her husband really was.

Because irony is a cruel mistress, the most tragic part of List's story is that his killing spree and subsequent run from life due to financial strain were entirely unnecessary. The eighteen room mansion where he and his family lived was home to a number of antiques, including an original Tiffany stained glass skylight, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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The LaserDisc release of The Stepfather is pretty bare bones, but given it's a mid-80's release, that's also not surprising. It's presented in the full 89-minute theatrical running time on a single two-sided extended play CLV disc, in an open matte 1.33:1 ratio. Despite that I didn't notice any weird things you sometimes see in open matte releases, like boom mics, light sources, or cables running across the floor. Kudos to the cinematographers for managing to keep all that out of sight!

Audio is a nice Ultra Stereo Analog-only mix which would have blown away the two-channel VHS mix from the same time period. The disc features no subtitles, but it is Closed Captioned, and that's always nice to see in these older releases. All you get here is the movie though: no trailer, no behind-the-scenes, no commentary, and oddly enough not even any chapter breaks, though this seems par for the course on Embassy 'disc releases.

Equally strange to me is that The Stepfather didn't get a DVD release until 2009, meaning that for more than twenty years, this was the optimal way to view the movie. Shout! Factory corrected that oversight, then followed it up a year later with a Blu-Ray release in 2010, making it far easier for people to enjoy what has become a cult classic in the intervening decades, though I have a sneaking suspicion it was to capitalize on the release of the remake (which, surprisingly, managed not to take a giant dump all over the source material while making several changes to the story to avoid the "Gus Van Sant Psycho" phenomenon).

Finally, in the 'hilariously useless trivia' department, the production company responsible for bringing The Stepfather to the screen, ITC Productions, was best known for their role in producing Jim Hensen's The Muppet Show for television audiences. Bet you never look at Kermit the Frog the same way again. ;)

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While it's far from the best movie in the world, I have no problems recommending The Stepfather to anyone -- especially if you're a fan of O'Quinn from his stints on recent popular television shows. The chops on this guy are unreal, the moments he transforms his personality throughout the show are stunning, and the times when he stumbles and forgets exactly who he's supposed to be are unforgettable and menacing. Who is he here? The guy we all should be paying to see more of, that's who.

Four blood-encrusted knife thrusts out of five.