The Stepfather Details

A sardonic and unerringly frightening B-movie classic that strips down the American Dream to its maggot-ridden gory glory. Shelley Hack and Jill Schoelen are a widow and her daughter who gradually come to realise that the charming, affable man of the house is actually a multiple murderer obsessed with middle-class values and establishing the perfect home. Their failure to live up to his pure vision of domestic bliss earmarks them as additions to his ever-growing list of victims. The acting is of a uniformly high standard, with Terry O'Quinn unforgettable as the maniacal patriarch whose psychotic mood swings tighten the suspense screws. Joseph Ruben's faultless direction sets the mayhem against an unsettling backdrop of painfully mundane normality. Thriller writer Donald E Westlake wrote the tightly constructed script.

"...THE STEPFATHER is an engrossing suspense thriller that refreshingly doesn't cheat the audience in terms of valid clues and plot twists..."