Step Down to Terror

Avoid any comparison with Hitchcock's masterful "shadow of a doubt" ,its remake would suffer ; nobody here can match the Teresa Wright/Joseph Cotten pair ,and the director can't begin to touch the master's genius of suspense of psychological tension .Thornton Wilder and Alma Hitchcock had dramatically enriched the original story ,by creating lots of new characters ,all more colorful than the one before .

In the family where the uncle takes refuge, there are only three persons; the mother ,the widowed daughter-in-law and her son ; the detective (played by Rod Taylor ,later star of Hitchcock's "the birds") plays a more prominent part than in the 1952 version,and he quickly falls in love with Helen ,the niece (there's no love/hate relationship between her and her uncle ) ; the ring is a good trick , so is the crushed bike .The film is rather short (about 75 min) and sometimes the events are too hurried for comfort; the denouement is rather poor and implausible .

Charles Drake is handsome and quite convincing when he charms the old ladies .

Needless to say ,you will always be better off with the fifties version.

****SPOILERS**** Overdone story about a serial killer who specializes in murdering wealthy widows dropping in on his mother and her step-daughter and grandson in California. whatever you think of Johnny Walters, Charles Drake, you know he's up to no good from the very beginning. Chased by what looked like two plain-clothes policemen he later drives west to see his mom Sarah Walter, Josephine Hutchinson, in the Golden State whom he hasn't seen in six years. Johnny has a split-personality with him being sweet gentle and loving as well as secretive nasty and violent.

Johnny inadvertently gets his sister-in-law Helen, Coleen Miller,to check out a newspaper that he ripped an article out of at the local public library and she sees in that newspaper that there's a killer on the loose and his latest victim was a woman from New Orleans who he murdered named Janice Dawson.

Sweet and kind Johnny gave Helen a ring with the initials J.D on it that he couldn't convincingly explain to her how those initials got there; a ring he won gambling Johnny told her. Later the policeman who came from out of state to arrest Johnny Mike Randall, Rod Taylor, calls Helen and tells her the good news that the killer who they were looking for who the police thought was Johnny was killed in a shoot out in New York City. This came across as pure gobbeldygook since how did the police know, just by him being dead, that he was the killer of the women that Johnny was suspected of killing. That still didn't explain Johnny's creepy and unnerving actions with Helen, who he tried to kill twice by having her fall down a stairway that he "fixed" and then later tried to kill her by putting a bottle of sleeping pills in her milk. I thought for a moment that Randall just wanted Helen as well as Johnny to know that he wasn't a suspect so that he would have his guard down and make it easier for the police to arrest him later.

Another thing that struck me was Johnny's mental state. Why would he throw suspicion on himself by tearing out the article about the killings since his name wasn't mentioned at all in the story? By him acting so guilty Johnny only made Helen suspect that he was the killer especially with the clue that he gave her. The ring with the initials G.D those of the killers victim in the article?

Charles Drake played a psycho killer to the hilt and almost as well as Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates in the movie "Psycho" two years later. The movie makers of "Step down to Terror" didn't seem to know how to end the picture with it having something like three different endings.

Ending #!. Johnny meekly giving himself up to the police. Ending #2. Johnny Cracking Randell's skull as he was about to arrest him. And Ending #3. Johnny driving away from the police and having his seven year-old nephew Doug,Ricky Kelman, come out of nowhere with his bike in front of Johnny's car and Johnny getting killed trying to avoid him with Helen in the car as a hostage surviving the crash.

Immediately recognizable as a remake of Hitchcock's 'Shadow of a Doubt'. Charles Drake adequately replicates Joseph Cotten's initially bland, innocuous deportment, but the movie, trimmed down in running time and the shedding of several characters, a significant step down from the original, looks formulaic and becomes increasingly defined by Drake's predictable terror by numbers performance.

1) Becoming worryingly irritated and aggressive over an engraved ring. 2) Unconvincingly finding a lame excuse to tear a page from the local newspaper. 3) Colleen Miller's young son receiving a new bicycle puts a drastic spoke in his wheel, sparking bitter memories relating to a cycling incident from his own past. Shortly afterwards he 'accidentally' reverses his car over the gleaming dream machine, instantly reducing it to scrap metal. 4) When the family are selected to partake in a survey involving interviews and photographs, he stays out of sight, retiring to his bed with a mystery illness. 5) The manic, rambling 'world is a jungle' rant, populated only by two faced, rotten to the core, money grabbing hypocrites, hiding behind a wafer thin veneer of respectability.

Colleen Miller takes on the Teresa Wright role of the astute and dutiful family member, who rumbles that there is something monstrous; a dangerous phony lurking behind Drake's outwardly avuncular facade. A remake that need never have been remade. As such, it is rarely more than mildly interesting and moderately entertaining. When it comes to suspense, Hitchcock holds all the cards.

Charles Drake shouts at his landlady who has taken some of the cash he has lying about. She says the next time the policemen ask if he's in, she'll tell them. So Drake goes on the lam, back to his mother's home in California, where he makes nice to her, to Colleen Miller, widow of his brother, and her son, Ricky Kelman. As he courts Miss Miller -- as does plainclothesman Rod Taylor, something darker than expected begins to emerge.

It's a remake of Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and on its own terms, it's okay, another Universal movie about the darkness that lies at the heart of sunny 1950s America. Of course, because it's a remake of what happens to be my favorite Hitchcock movie, it seems weak in comparison. Still, for an ordinary programmer, it's all right. With Jocelyn Brando and Ann Doran.

Based on the title, I initially thought Step Down to Terror was going to be a horror film. I soon realized my error. That's fine because I was also up for a good suspense film and always happy to see Rod Taylor. Step Down to Terror isn't completely lacking in suspense, but unfortunately, there just isn't enough of it. For starters, I think the film takes to long in the set-up before it actually gets really interesting. Then when it does get interesting and suspense starts it's fairly quickly snuffed out when the female lead oddly, and unfortunately for everyone involved, including the audience, decides to put everything out there. The very ending scene is odd and seemed like a last minute kind of thing.