i await my fellow posters replies.
Just saw this movie for the first time, so I'll gladly respond to your comments
1.the acting in the original was awful. Terry O'Quinn was just too hammy and
Jill Schoelen and Shelly Hack were simply horrible. plus the production
values were low grade even for a low budget/independent film. plus quite
franky it was boring at times.
I thought Terry O'Quinn, (whom I have only seen before in "Lost"; I'm not much of a TV viewer) was masterful in this role. The "hamminess" you refer to is probably his slightly over-enthusiastic cheerfulness; the very quality that the daughter found so unsettling, and which made her intuitively feel that something was wrong with him. Since as an audience we know from scene One just who and what he is, we're privy as to
why there's a slightly off note to his painful normality. And because of that cheerful blandness, when we finally see his outbursts, they are all the more disturbing for their explosive violence. All in all, an utterly convincing portrait of a psychopath who manages to get away with it over and over again.
Mom and Daughter's performance were adequate if not stellar, and Jill Schoelen brought an interesting mix of innocence and wariness to her role as 16 year old Stephanie. Not much to complain about there.
Production Values: not high, but didn't need to be. This was a completely character-driven story that required nothing extraordinary or fancy; it really didn't need to be tarted up.
As for "boring"; quiet scenes sparked with underlying menace aren't as "exciting" as a constant flow of Hollywood shock-tactics. Whether ot not it's boring is pretty much personal taste.
2.i liked the 2009 remake much better on these points. plus it zipped along
and was not dull for a second. also it didn't hurt that Penn Badgely had
at least 6 possibly 7 barechested scenes each one shot better than the
previous one.
I haven't seen the remake, but if a series of boob shots is the one of the best recommendations you can make over the original (one boob shot; totally extraneous and purely gratuitous as it is), then perhaps I might recommend a few choice websites where you can actually get more of it, for free, even. Why waste money on a movie?
3.also it made more sense for the mother to be a divorcee than a widow. a
divorcee it much more likely to be angry and want to even at her cheating
ex-hubby and hook up with the first good looking guy who asks her out.
whereas a widow assuming she was deeply in love with her recently dead spouse
would have taken much longer that Hack's character did to hook up let alone
marry another man.
Actually, a widow who had been deeply in love with her recently dead spouse is a much better mark for someone like Jerry Blake, since anger eventually cools down, but the emptiness created by the loss of a true love is something that can really be exploited by someone offering a way to fill it again. Who's more easily manipulated: an angry divorcee, or a grieving widow? The divorcee already knows that what seems good can be phony: but a widow who's husband died before the marriage went bad still believes in the ideal of a perfect marriage and family; just what Jerry was offering. Makes much more sense when you look at it that way.
If anything, the worst part of the original was the predictable, standard thriller climax. I don't know how else it might have ended, but it was the weakest part of the film. And O'Quinn's performance was definitely the strongest.
I almost expected to see a family of birds crawl out of the ruined birdhouse in that final scene when Stephanie cuts it down., (Did anyone notice that the Birdhouse was a replica of the house of the family in Scene #1?)
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http://www.drunkduck.com/2_Bitter_4_Words/ ~
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mittelbergjr
14 years ago
I agree with a previous poster who said that because of the remake we finally got the original on DVD. When I heard they were doing a remake of it the first thing I thought was would the original get released. They did not disappoint.
As for the original poster. The original The Stepfather is far from horrible. Now you have your opinion. Everyone is entitled to theirs. But for me where as I did enjoy the so called "remake" I really enjoyed the original a whole lot more. Terry O'Quinn was perfect. Dylan Walsh was so-so. Jill Schoelen in the original was great. I had a crush on her as a kid and to me could do no wrong no matter what she was in. The kid in the new one was not that great. He really annoyed me. Now the only thing I liked more about the new one was Sela Ward. To me she was the best part of the film. Shelly Hack in the original was too whiney for me. The scene were she slaps her daughter and tells her to respect Jerry makes me cringe. Her voice. Ugh! Outside of that the original rocks. The remake doesn't. In fact it doesn't even come close.
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