Daddy, can you turn this?

“Lost” is done for the season, which puts us fans into a bit of a quandary. Sure, there are all these online puzzles and clues to follow, and there’s that Bad Twin tie-in novel that came out, but as distracting as those can be, none of them make up for the fact that I won’t be seeing the characters themselves doing anything new for at least three months. (Stalking Evangeline Lily from a rooftop across the street just isn’t the same, no matter what size lens I use.)

The best I can come up with is to see what my favorite actors on the show were doing before they got stranded in Hawaii. Jack and Locke are, for me, the best characters, but Matthew Fox’s major pre-Jack claim to fame was his run on “Party of Five,” and I’d rather (gulp) not watch TV at all than sit through a soap opera emo fest. Terry O’Quinn, though… that dude’s been around. Looking over his extensive filmography, I noticed one that I've been meaning to see for years: The Stepfather.

Meet Jerry (O’Quinn). Jerry is a big believer in the sanctity of the home and family, but his step-daughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen) doesn’t trust him; maybe it’s just displaced grief over the loss of her father a year ago, or simply regular teenage hormones, but she can’t get through a school day without starting a fight, and Jerry annoys the hell out of her. She tries to explain things to her psychiatrist, but as sympathetic as he is to her concerns, he doesn’t understand what she’s getting it, and she can’t find the words to express it.

She better keep trying, though. Because there is something wrong with Jerry: for one thing, Jerry isn’t even his real name, and for another, the life he has now isn’t the life he’s always had. Before he came to live with the Blakes, he was stepfather to another family, a family that may have lived up to his expectations for a time but ultimately disappointed him. And when Jerry gets disappointed, he gets very, very angry…

One of those rare b-movie horror pictures that actually manages to be even better than its reputation, The Stepfather takes a disturbing, if potentially silly, premise and gives it as an expert a treatment as you could hope for. There are a few nods to camp (“Father knows best,” etc.), but as whole, the film keeps things surprisingly realistic, and the blackly comic moments are subtle enough that you don’t feel assaulted by them.

This respect for the audience’s intelligence is less surprising when you realize Donald E. Westlake wrote the screenplay. Westlake is best known for a series of comic crime novels revolving around a thief named Dortmunder (see Martin Lewis’s What’s the Worst That Could Happen? for a recent adaptation; or better yet, don’t), but he’s also done more than his fair share of dark work, including the Parker novels, which focus on the single-minded career criminal Parker and his various exploits, and thrillers like The Ax and The Hook, which take supposedly ordinary men, put them in desperate situations, and then turn the screws till something bursts.

It’s these latter novels that Stepfather reminded me of the most of. While Jerry is far from normal, there is a very specific methodology to his killings, and his ultimate goal, the creation and perpetuation of a perfect nuclear family, makes for some interesting social commentary. The Ax is an extraordinarily dark look at the job marketplace, while The Hook lays down the harsh realities of the publishing world, which demands a constant influx of new, saleable product, with little concern for the cultivating of actual talent. With Stepfather, we have the ultimate end of all those fifties sitcoms- “My Three Sons,” “Leave it to Beaver,” etc.: a man who’s so invested in his own idea of perfection, his own desperate need to create a home life to make up for his apparently horrific childhood (we don’t get anything as clear as an “official” backstory, but from the comments Jerry lets slide in his rages, it’s not hard to believe he had a rough time as a kid), that he’s willing to kill anyone and anything who fails to live up to his unreachable standards. His word view is so horrifyingly entrenched that change isn’t simply painful, it’s inconceivable, and one feels that murder for him is the only way he can think of to fix a problem, because he is incapable of compromise or growth.

What makes the movie truly great is that in spite of all of this, you still feel a little sympathy for Jerry by the end; that we care at all about a mass-murdering psychopath is due largely to Terry O’Quinn’s pitch perfect performance in a role that would have fallen apart in lesser hands. There’s precious little “Here’s Johnny” type over-emoting here, and while he’s definitely threatening when he needs to be, what hit me the most was his utter sincerity; there’s a terrific moment near the end when O’Quinn sees a mother and daughter welcoming their father home from work. As the family goes indoors, the little girl turns, sees Terry watching, and waves to him. Terry waves back. It’s a lovely, low-key scene, with no leering or catchphrases to ruin it, and it makes Terry’s ultimate breakdown perfectly understandable. That brief moment of happiness seemed so perfect, and while you realize growing up that it isn’t always like that, that it hardly ever is, who wouldn’t want to make a place where they were so loved?

The film has some minor flaws: there’s a subplot with the brother of Jerry’s last victim that, while not terrible, didn’t do a whole lot for me, and if you aren’t a fan of this sort of thriller, it’s doubtful that the movie will completely turn you around. But it’s really good, with the rest of the cast being just as convincing in their roles as O’Quinn is. (Jill Schoelen is excellent as Stephanie; I especially liked how apologetic her rebelliousness was, like she really didn’t want to mess everything up, she just could help it.) There’s, surprise surprise, a remake in the works, which I’m indifferent towards- there is way too much subtlety in the original for a remake not to muck up- but hopefully the remake will get the original a solid DVD release, and attract some new viewers. It definitely deserves them.

(Cross-posted, just for fun)