The Stepfather

It’s Dan Humphrey vs. Dr. Sean McNamara with Disturbia’s backdrop. And yes, it’s as terrible as it sounds.

After a year in boot camp, Michael (Penn Badgley) comes home to find that his recently divorced mother Susan (Sela Ward) is engaged to David Harris (Dylan Walsh), a mysterious but good-natured stranger. Unbeknownst to the family, “David” is actually Grady Edwards, a serial killer that targets single mothers and their families. Michael becomes suspicious and spends most of the movie trying to convince the rest of his family that David is not whom he appears to be. In classic scary movie denial, nobody believes him until the corpses have piled up.

 If you can understand words, you are too smart for this movie. The “twists” are obvious, and anyone with even a modest knowledge of horror movie tropes will see them coming. In one scene of cinematic brilliance, an old lady informs David that she saw a man who looked just like him on America’s Most Wanted. She is brutally murdered shortly thereafter—gasp! Why didn’t she just call the police? Apparently, horror movie writers don’t factor in silly things like logic.

The movie is not totally devoid of redeeming qualities, though. Walsh makes for a convincing psychopath, providing the film with at least some semblance of psychological depth. The rest of the cast wallows in mediocrity, but there’s only so much a good actor can do with a two-dimensional character and script.

The only scary thing about The Stepfather is that someone thought remaking the 1987 original was a good idea.