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Brenda's Review of The Stepfather 1987 *Spoilers* · Brenda's Horror Movie Reviews

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is Brenda, and this morning we are gonna review one of my favorites.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's the stepfather from 1987.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have Terry O'Quinn playing The Stepfather, and I'm not even gonna give him a fuck you since I like him so much, but oh I'm glad he wasn't my stepdad.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: You might know him also as John Locke from Lost, and he also starred with Vanessa Williams in 666 Park Avenue, which sadly only had one season, partially due to one million mom sticking its nose where it didn't belong.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: The Stepfather also stars Shelly Hack.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: She was a famous model in the 70s and 80s, primarily known for doing the Charlie commercials.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I remember my mother having that Charlie perfume, and I hate to say it, but I thought it smelled so bad.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you were gonna put the smell of shit, death, and regret in a bottle and shake it up, this is what you would end up with.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is no slow build in this movie.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: This one jumps right into it.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: We see Jerry Blake getting out of the shower, he's washing blood off of him, he starts changing his look.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: He changes his hair, he shaves, he throws his glasses away, and what we're watching is him getting ready to leave the house.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: We see him pick up a few things, he's got a little suitcase with him, and as he leaves, he passes a bloody family.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: The children, the wife, they're all in the living room, even though he's still trying to pick up a little bit, which gives us a little window into his need for perfection.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: He tosses that suitcase he was carrying in the water, and it contains his glasses, his wedding ring, and bloody clothes.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: As he's leaving the house, he's whistling Camp Town Races.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: That seems to be his song of choice.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then we jump a year into the future, and he's managed to replace his old family with a new wife and a teenage stepdaughter.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: As most teenagers, she doesn't seem overly fond of him at the beginning, but then he shows up with a puppy.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to be a teenager anyway, and Stephanie's real dad died, so she's seeing a therapist.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: She'd been getting in some trouble at school, got in a fight, got expelled, and she's actually wanting to leave and go to boarding school.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry doesn't want to break up his perfect little family, and at this time now he's selling real estate.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: The brother of the prior wife is doing his own little investigation of the family murder.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: He teams up with a reporter from the Seattle Examiner and has an article published to reopen the case.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: He found out that Jerry, who was going by Henry then, had quit his job three weeks before the murder, but he was still acting like he was going to work every day.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: He was using that time to slither in on a new woman.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry throws a neighborhood barbecue at his house, primarily for the neighbors that he sold homes to, and one of them has that article about Henry slash Jerry, but there is no picture.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing that case was open again, stressed Jerry out where he's in the basement having a fit and Stephanie overhears him.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: This makes Stephanie's mind start to race, so she actually sends a letter to the Seattle examiner requesting a picture related to that article.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry is the one who gets the mail that day, sees the return address, he keeps it.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: He takes the picture of himself out and replaces it with a different one to give to Stephanie.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So now Stephanie is actually starting to believe Jerry's bullshit.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But now Stephanie's therapist is wanting to talk with Jerry.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry is refusing, so the therapist calls and makes an appointment to view a home.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: He starts asking too many questions and ends up getting himself killed.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: He moves the body and makes it look like a car accident.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And again, he's whistling Camptown races.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie starts seeing a new therapist in the same building as the old one, and while she's waiting, she goes into the old office just to kind of reminisce and sees the appointment that he had made with Jerry.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie has actually been showing interest in a boy, and when Jerry catches them kissing on the front porch, he goes ballistic and accuses this 16-year-old boy of rape.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, his wife is telling him that he's going too far.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: So with all these things happening, his perfect life is falling apart again.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: His brother-in-law had found a magazine with missing pages, and he goes to find out what the missing pages were, and he finds that it was an article on small towns.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: He has a radius circled on a map letting him know how far he believes that Jerry could have gone each day while he was going to work to be able to find a new wife and a new life.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when his wife calls the real estate office and has been told that Jerry hasn't been working there any longer, she knows something's up.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, when Susan confronts Jerry, he's gonna lie his way around it, but then he starts forgetting who he is and even says, Who am I here?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Brother-in-law is able to narrow it down and actually finds the house that Jerry's been living in with his new wife and stepdaughter.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how us women are, we're gonna start asking a lot of questions, get our asses pushed down the basement stairs.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie's in the shower, comes out, Jerry goes up with a knife to go after her, but the doorbell rings and it is the brother-in-law Jim.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And um, he ends up getting stabbed.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie stabs Jerry with a piece of broken mirror.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: She ends up running to the attic, and Jerry goes up there after her, and he ends up falling through the attic floor.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Susan's able to get the gun that Jim had dropped and shoots Jerry in the leg.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Stephanie grabs the knife and then stabs Jerry.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And with all that, I will let you know that Terry O'Quinn appears in Stepfather 2 in 1989.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a Stepfather 3 and then there's the Stepfather 2009 remake.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see how I'm gonna rate this sucker on the wine glass scale.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: As far as being eerie, not really.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can't give it one for that.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: The environment, I like it.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I like the old tree-lined streets that they show, so I'm gonna go ahead and give it a wine glass.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's very evil.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: He gets his own wine glass.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: On the empathy scale, that puppy that he had given Stephanie, I thought for sure he was gonna kill that dog, but luckily he didn't.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it still made me a little nervous and feel a little bit, so I will go ahead and give it a half a wine glass for making me nervous.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: As far as being entertaining, I'll give it two wine glasses.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I would watch it again.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that one earned four and a half wine glasses.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: My next review is going to be John Carpenter's The Fog from 1980 with Adrian Barbeau.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So until then.