The Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, lay in a crumpled heap on the floor of the Battle Beyond the Stars exhibit in the Museum of Schlock. I was still cradling my bleeding hand as my finger had been just bitten off by Count Zarth Arn from Starcrash. 

“Take care of him,” Count Zarth Arn said as the robot sheriff Elle dragged the Revenging Manta away. 

“Count Zarth Arn,” I said scanning the floor for my severed finger. 

“My name is the Goose Lord!” he yelled before laughing maniacally.

— To be continued.

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This week’s movie is 1987’s The Stepfather from director Joseph Ruben. This is a slasher movie. Wikipedia lists this as “psychological horror,” but this flick falls primarily in the slasher genre. We get a scene of a scruffy Terry O’Quinn cutting his hair and shaving off his beard in a bathroom mirror. By the time he’s done, he is a dapper man in a grey suit. As he leaves his house, we see the gutted bodies of his slaughtered family. We can only conclude the stepfather thing didn’t work out with that family.

Our would-be stepfather is now living under the name Jerry Blake. He’s a clean cut real estate salesman with a loving wife, Susan (Shelley Hack), and her stepdaughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). Stephanie doesn’t really accept Jerry and his fake smile. Maybe it’s the whole Ward Clever act he puts on. For you young folks out there, Ward Cleaver was a character on the 1950s situational comedy television series, Leave It to Beaver. He was basically America’s dad, the breadwinner, the one who knew best. Not that I ever watched the show.

Anyway, Susan is constantly getting into fights at school. She’s acting out because of Jerry and his constant attempts to win her trust. Jerry even gets Susan a puppy, but she still won’t call him dad. Susan manages to get herself expelled and her friend warns her that she may get sent to boarding school. Susan actually thinks that’s a marvelous idea, but Jerry doesn’t want her to go away. He doesn’t want to break up the family. 

Susan is seeing a sympathetic therapist named Dr. Bondurant (Charles Lanyer). Like Susan, he begins to suspect Jerry is not what he appears to be. Dr. Bondurant goes undercover as a prospective home buyer, starts asking Jerry all kinds of probing questions. Jerry responds, naturally, by murdering Dr. Bondurant, shoving him in his car, and setting it on fire, a grisly scene.

Meanwhile, there’s a side plot about Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen), the brother of Jerry’s previous wife. He’s out hunting for the man who slaughtered his sister and her family. The police dropped the ball and he’s working with a reporter to invetsigate where the stepfather now resides. This never works out well in slasher movies, the whole obsessive-guy-seeking-revenge-on-the-killer situation. I think back to Friday the 13th Part IV and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and The Devil’s Rejects. No, Jimbo, the final girl must take on the psychopath, and we know it’s going to be Susan.

I’m always delighted to see Terry O’Quinn in anything, whether that be the television series Lost or Millennium. And it looks like I’ve got two more Stepfather movies to cover this month, which is odd considering that Jerry is dead as a doornail by the end of this picture.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, and episode 575) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.