Stepfather: Il patrigno

I haven't seen this film in years - I'm glad to get a chance to watch it again. It is a good horror film overall.

Terry O'Quinn is fantastic as Jerry Blake - his performance is amazing. He "MADE" this film - and made it scary. This one rates fairly high on my personal scare factor scale. The character Jerry Blake is one twisted, cunning, evil and vile man. This guy is definitely off his rocker - not a man you would ever want to be around.

The story is not all that bad, interesting, but this film is worth watching for Terry O'Quinn alone. The rest of the cast is good as well. Generally speaking, horror movie fans should like this film - it is creepy slasher thriller.

7/10

The Stepfather has many memorable scenes. Terry O`Quinn portraits a very sick man, and this madness is made clear from the very start of the movie, when the (step)father has just killed his family and we are introduced to him as he removes his beard and in other ways alters his appearence to allow him to find another family and again become THE STEPFATHER. The most memorable scene for me is when he interrupts his step daughter on the porch kissing her date for the evening good night. The stepfather snaps, because he wants the family to remain static for ever, he is crazy. So then his wife comes down and she yells at the stepfather saying that he has ruined what they had built up. The expression on his face when hearing that is one of sheere terror. The stepfather is so fragile. The basement scene where the step daugther is getting something in the freezer and the stepfather rushes into the basement to let off some steem, not knowing she is there. It is all very scary.

Nice guy (Terry O'Quinn) gets married to lovely wife (Shelley Hack) and her rebellious daughter (Jill Schoelen). He wants his family to be like "The Brady Bunch" or "Father Knows Best". However when his family doesn't live up to his expectations he brutally kills them, changes his identity and moves on to find another unmarried woman with kids. And he's getting tired of Hack and Schoelen...

Exceptional thriller. O'Quinn gives a top-notch performance as the killer. He's helped by a very intricate script. Those two combined make you understand why he kills and plays with your emotions--I found myself actually liking the guy (for a while). There isn't a lot of violence in this, but when it appears it's very sudden, extremely bloody and shocking.

The only liabilities here are Hack and Schoelen--they're pretty bad in their roles. But O'Quinn and the script more than make up for them.

A sadly forgotten thriller from the late 80s. Well worth catching.

This is one of the best thrillers to emerge from the 1980s. It has assured direction from Joseph Reuben. An excellent script by Donald E. Westlake.And an absolutely mesmerizing performance from Terry O'Quinn, who invests his character with enough repressed fury to make most screen psychos look like Mr Rogers.

The film starts out with a real sense of style as O'Quinn washes his bloody hands in a bathroom sink then proceeds to alter his appearance drastically before walking downstairs to his murdered family; its a startling and creepy beginning and the rest of the film is as stylish and well done. I think its biggest strength is the well-developed psychopathology of Terry O'Quinn's character. His behavior actually makes sense in terms of his madness. This is a refreshing change of pace from most films of this type, where the killers have zero motivation and are just plot-devices.

As a general rule, I don't quote dialogue from a movie in my comment summary (to me, it seems like the lazy thing to do), but the above line, as uttered by Terry O' Quinn towards the end of The Stepfather, is so perfectly delivered that I decided to make an exception. And this is just one of many genuinely chilling moments in this excellent 80s thriller that go to make it unmissable entertainment for anyone who loves scary movies.

The lovely Jill Schoelen plays troubled teen Stephanie, who has every right to be disturbed: her father died a year ago, and she suspects that her new stepfather, the seemingly perfect Jerry (O'Quinn), is a serial killer. Of course, Stephanie is right—Jerry IS a complete nutter: desperate to become part of a perfect American family, he marries widows and divorcées with children, but kills them when they fail to measure up to his exacting standards.

Jim Ogilvie, the brother of one of Jerry's past victims, is hot on the psycho's trail, but with Jerry becoming increasingly disappointed with his new stepdaughter, will Jim catch up with the maniac before another family is slaughtered?

Sharply written, with excellent direction from Joseph Ruben, and a brilliant central performance from O'Quinn, The Stepfather rarely puts a foot wrong. At a push, one might argue that Jerry's ability to adopt a new persona after each massacre is a touch too easy, but this is a minor quibble and doesn't affect the power of the film in any way. Schoelen is also superb, offering just the right balance of vulnerability and spunky bravado (plus we get to see her in the shower–hurrah!).

The Stepfather proved to be a minor success on it's original release, and inevitably spawned a sequel, but over the past two decades, it seems to have been forgotten by many (no-one at my place of work seemed to know anything about it). Now that a remake is in the pipeline, perhaps more people will choose to investigate the original; it's a film that certainly deserves to be rediscovered by the masses.