Some months back, TCM ran Bette Davis' final film, Wicked Stepmother, as part of TCM Underground. The movie was paired with one that had an appropriate title for the pairing, The Stepfather. Not having seen either, I recently got around to watching The Stepfather.
Terry O'Quinn plays the stepfather, although at the beginning of the movie he doesn't have what is going to be his step-family for the rest of the movie. In fact, he briefly has a different one. He's in the bathroom of his house, shaving off his beard and replacing his eyeglasses with contact lenses (obviously he didn't watch Richard Basehart in Tension). After a shower and a change of clothes, he walks downstairs, where he see that the rest of his family has been murdered, presumably by him! He just walks out of his house and into a new life somewhere in the Seattle area.
In the next scene, we get a caption helpfully telling us it's one year later. Stephanie Maine (Jill Schoelen) is the daughter in a family together with her mom Susan (Shelley Hack) and Susan's second husband Jerry, who is obviously the same guy who murdered his previous family. But not that Susan or Stephanie know it. Well, not yet. Stephanie has had adjustment problems ever since her biological father died, and gets the sense that something with Jerry may not be quite right. How much of that is because we know his past, and how much of that is a teenager having difficulty dealing with the death of her father and Mom moving on to a new husband is a subject for debate. But in any case, the adjustment issues are enough for Stephanie to be seeing a shrink, Dr. Bondurant.
Eventually entering the picture is Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen). Jim was away traveling at the time of the notorious murder, which has since become a cold case. Technically, the police know who did it, but the father of that family was using an assumed identity at the time of that murder, and nobody knows his original identity or what he could have changed it to now. Jim is the brother of the murdered mother in the family, so he has a good reason for wanting justice, even if he can't understand that the police aren't doing anything because they have nothing to go on. Jim decides he's going to start doing some detective work himself.
Amazingly, nothing in the house is decaying even though it's been unoccupied for a year, and Jim is conveniently able to find an old travel magazine with an article cut out that's going to provide a key clue. Why none of that stuff was removed from the house by the police and cataloged as evidence is one of the plot holes you should probably not think so hard about as you're watching the movie.
While Jim is doing his sleuthing, Stephanie is beginning to get increasingly worried about her stepfather, to the point that she does some detctive work of her own, trying to get a picture of the murderer from the other family. She also thinks about going off to boarding school to get away from her stepfather, although he doesn't approve of it, and absolutely won't talk to Dr. Bondurant about it. Stephanie, however, has some good reason for her increasing worry -- when the newspaper printed an article about the other murder, albeit without the murderer's photo, she saw her stepfather fly into a rage down in the basement when he thought nobody was watching him. And he's going to go into a rage a few more times before it's all over.
The Stepfather is a mostly effective little movie, at least if you can get over some of the plot holes in the script and the convenient coincidences. Terry O'Quinn is quite good as the stepfather we know is an evil man but is able to fool everybody around him. Schoelen and Shellen are both adequate, while Shelley Hack is underused. If you want something a little different from the usual fare of classic movies and stars I recommend, then The Stepfather isn't a bad little diversion.
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