‘Stepfather’ bores best

• By PATRICK RILLS
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Oct 27, 2009

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"The Stepfather" is the latest in an overloaded schedule of horror movies that are rushed to release by the Halloween deadline. However, even calling "The Stepfather" a horror movie is a notion that deserves to get grounded and sent to its room without dinner.

"The Stepfather" stars Dylan Walsh ("Nip/Tuck") as the seemingly perfect new boyfriend of a single mother, played by Sela Ward. When her oldest teenage son (Penn Badgley) returns home from military school, he is more than a little suspicious of his soon-to-be stepfather's odd behavior. The family soon discovers -- undoubtedly as they are being chased around the house by a butcher-knife-wielding maniac -- that the man they've accepted into their family is a psychopathic serial killer.

The premise suggests a decent foundation for a horror movie, but in reality, the villain of "The Stepfather" is the most boring and pointless fictional serial killer that has ever existed. He travels across America from family to family, spends an exorbitant amount of time acclimating himself, gaining their trust, establishing a home -- only to kill them randomly. Even by a senseless killer's standards, it is the largest exercise in futility since J.S. Cardone, the screenwriter for this film, bought Microsoft Word.

So maybe the filmmakers didn't set out to make a horror film. Maybe they were going for suspense. Except the only suspense consists of the main character stoically staring out of a window or slamming his hand down really hard on a table. Without music cues, the audience wouldn't even know when they should get scared.

Most of the time in "The Stepfather" is spent foreshadowing "twists" of the plot that the majority of us could have guessed before we walked into the theater. It was akin to watching a terrible episode of "Dateline" with only the poorly constructed, hardly believable reenactments and lacking the melodramatic narration or at least the entertainment value of Chris Hanson coaxing a pedophile onto a bar stool.

"The Stepfather" is actually a remake of a 1987 film of the same name. Who knew? Better yet -- who cares? Much like the its predecessor, this unmemorable and bland film will largely vanish without a trace.