The Stepfather

Remakes to horror films are a dime a dozen these days and I have no real defense as to why I saw this movie, but there was something about it that looked interesting to me. Maybe it was the cast, I really do not know. The trailer pretty much gave away everything, although horror movies are rarely about the surprise these days. So on a Saturday night in Utah, I sat in a tiny 80 seat theater and watched this movie while innocent Mormon teens on group dates surrounded me in this PG-13 flick.

David Harris(Dylan Walsh) is a widowed man who lost his wife and daughter in a car accident a year before this movie takes place. He is trying to put his life back together and helping him is a divorced mother of three, Susan(Sela Ward). 6 months after they meet, they are engaged and he is living with the family. Susan's oldest son, Michael(Penn Badgley) has just come home from some nondescript military school for some nondescript behavioral issues and he is not exactly warming up to the idea of a stepfather. However, Harris seems like a genuinely nice guy who just wants the perfect family. Yet, he sometimes says things that come off as creepy and he is a bit mysterious, always paying in cash, not liking his picture taken oh and a killer on America's Most Wanted kind of looks like him. All of this arouses the suspicion of Michael who begins to find anything he can about Harris to prove he is a killer.

As far as horror movies go, The Stepfather is perfectly adequate. There is nothing terribly exciting about the movie, but it is not a total disaster either. The opening scene, while almost a carbon copy of the original is a nice way to set up the picture and Dylan Walsh does a really good job at making super nice seem super creepy at all moments. He also does a great job of showing the chinks in the David's armor and just how crazy the man is, especially in a late night scene where he is talking to himself, trying to pump himself up. Walsh has shined on Nip/Tuck, and I am not sure this movie will gain him a ton more movie roles, but he satisfied the role well enough for my tastes.

Penn Badgley is an action star in waiting, in my opinion. He is kind of slumming it in a PG-13 horror movie, but this is what stars of The CW do, so it is hard to blame him. He is a stoic, brave looking young man with big arms, an interesting voice and a pretty good screen presence. He is not the world's greatest actor, but he does what he is supposed to do. I think it is only a matter of time before he is getting action pictures, but even in those he will probably spend a lot of time shirtless, which was a running theme in this film for sure. The movie takes place in the middle of summer and the family has a pool so Badgley, and Amber Heard who plays his girlfriend, spend a lot of time in and around the pool.

Amber Heard, oh Amber Heard. Good God this girl is hot. He appears in 8 scenes and in 4 of them she is prancing around in itsy bitsy bikinis, coming out of water in slow motion and using her ample sexuality to flirt with Penn and the audience. Then she spends two scenes laying in bed in a tiny tank top and panties, for no other reasons than to make all those Mormon boys in the theater very nervously unsure of what to do. She is among the hottest young actresses out there right now, but she can't really act, so I am not sure if she can be called an actress. More precisely she is a hot piece of ass who will most likely always be in a bikini in her movies. Bikinis appear to have been created specifically for her body and any slow motion shot of her coming out of the water turns this movie into something so much better than it really is. If it seems extreme to devote an entire paragraph to the body of Amber Heard, well you have not seen the body of Amber Heard, then, because if you have, you would understand the need for a paragraph like this.

The Stepfather has a predictable climax, but it gets points for giving us a rain storm in the middle of summer just because horror movies are supposed to have the climax take place in the rain. it gets points for giving us a lesbian couple without making a big deal out of it. It has two or three moments that made most people jump and it actually deals with the horror film cell phone problem in a semi realistic way. This may not seem like actual good points for the movie, but the horror film cell phone problem is almost always annoying and in this movie, you actually believe both of the things that happen, can actually happen. There is nothing ultimately exciting or interesting in the movie, but I have seen many a horror film that were a lot worse than this movie. I was semi entertained, even if it was mostly for Amber Heard's bikini body.

Final Grade: C-