SCREEN

The Stepfather at Cinema 57

SO YOU'VE GOT AN OEDIPUS complex. Dad's piling on perfectionist pressure, throwing temper tantrums--maybe smacking up Mom a bit. Monday Night Football's making him increasingly violent and you think maybe it's time for a family counselor. But before you start bitching, maybe you should ask yourself this basic question: how many families has Dad butchered?

The Stepfather's premise is that mass murder is a viable form of family planning--quicker than divorce, and a hell of a lot more fun, if your interests lie toward the macabre. Terry O'Quinn, playing the psycho Stepfather, has a proposition no one can refuse. He wants the perfect family, the American Dream, and if things don't work out...well, then, what's one dead family more or less.

Donald Westlake wrote the screenplay for this effectively suspenseful and brutal twist of America's suburban search for T.V. family bliss. No familial unit ever had it as good or as saccharine smooth as the Brady Bunch, but the Stepfather, leaving a trail of bodies and abandoned identities behind him, is set on making media myth a reality.

Westlake is the author of a number of intricate, blackly humorous mysteries which reflect the theme of violent role-changing that runs through this movie. The author has an obvious fascination with such switching--"Westlake" is actually a pseudonym used by a well-hidden British journalist--and it is this identity confusion which is the movie's strength.

The gore is minimized, applied selectively and effectively only to establish the grotesque split in the Stepfather's personality. The film opens on a green-lawned, oh-what-a-day suburban street: paper boy, sprinklers, honeydripping Golden Grahams sunrise--the works. Dramatic cut to a steam-filed, murky bathroom in which stands the Stepfather, blood dribbling down his bearded face. The camera follows his bloody hands as he clips his straggly hair, shaves the beard, and pops in some green contacts.

Steely-eyed toilette finished, our man has transformed himself from a work-stained Charlie Manson into a square-jawed yuppie with a crinkly smile that could sell miles and miles of Kodak film. Whistling cheerfully, he cruises downstairs past a wall smeared with bloody handprints. Tension and soundtrack build as we wonder just what our cheerful quick-change artist is up to. Then, smiling wistfully, he pauses to pick up a child's toy. The camera follows him down, and there, sprawled messily across the living room, lies his butchered family.

Smears and chunks, torn furniture and flesh gouge our eyes as the Stepfather, unconcerned in the carnage, moves aside a bloody teddy-bear and steps out into the aforementioned Golden Grahams sunlight. He whistles happily up the street, waving a cheerful hello to the paper boy, and disappears into "One year later..."--where we find him with a new family.

The dialogue is spiced with occasional shots of black humor, all based on our exclusive knowledge that behind the smiling stepdad exterior lurks a raging psycho. Family Number Two is struggling for a reconciliation, and the Stepfather suggests, "C'mon, honey let's bury the hatchet." Gulp. But all you slasher-thrasher fans out there be warned. The Stepfather would rank low on Joe-Bob Briggs boobs'n'blood scale; this is suspense you bozos: protracted anticipation laced with adrenaline, not gory gratification every six and a half minutes, Friday the 13th-style.

Terry O'Quinn as the stepfather carries the burden of this suspense expertly, equally convincing in all his character's twisted levels of reality. His abrupt facial shifts from genial daddy to iron-jawed psycho are scary as hell--the expressions of contained violence, forced cheer, and wistful longing that flicker through this dude's eyes would shame many a Max Factor model. This guy really wants a happy family, and you see it in his face as he pitifully watches happy neighbors prancing around their lawns. Gotta love his end, it's just his means that send Oedipal chills up the back.

The movie's few flirtations with the Halloween genre are handled economically and gracefully--the psychiatrist/investigator, the macho-hero-in-pursuit, the hardboiled reporter, and the renegade cop all have their moment as they rotate around the central character. There's even a brief humorous romance for Daughter Number Two, and Shelley Hack, ex-Charlie's Angel, makes a successful shift from feathered hair and bellbottoms to mid-urban motherhood.

But the movie's overwhelming presence is O'Quinn, smiling and snarling his schizophrenic way through this family nightmare. If divorce, separation, and other sibling squabbles are wearing you out with their humdrum irritations, check out The Stepfather for some inner-family tension at slightly higher stakes.