Movie Review | The Stepfather (McCormick, 2009)
You know this is gonna be bad right from the first scene, where the direction is way more overbearing than in the original while totally sapping any impact from the gruesome reveal. This has a certain slickness characteristic of the late 2000s, but the visual style gets so shitty anytime there’s a scare. Why the fuck does this have shakycam?
This also is way worse when it comes to the dynamic with the skeptical stepchild, played here by Penn Badgely, whose slowness in catching on makes him seem dimwitted more than anything else. He has a girlfriend played by Amber Heard, and while I didn’t use a stopwatch, it seemed like she spent half her screentime in a bikini.
Dylan Walsh is actually convincing in playing a dad, but cannot act scary to save his life, and the direction’s total inability to imbue him with menace makes this feel like a parody more than a real horror movie. If you insist on watching this, I’d suggest doing a double feature with the original so you understand the importance of actually directing actors.
It also might be worth watching for some laughs around its use of cellphones and computers in the plot, but I can only hope someone edited these into a compilation and posted them on YouTube. This also ends with by setting up a potential sequel and throws in a brand new awful hairdo for Walsh and a nu metal cover of “Happy Together”.
