He Just Wants The Perfect Family

 I'll say this is a companion piece to a review on the blog back in September 2012. A good eight years allows time to maybe see something fresh. This was a great find on home video in the early 90s. O'Quinn was a revelation in the film, his "Jerry" looking for this perfect family that would never exist. And you get an early view, a gruesome display of bloody carnage that clearly serves as a tragic example of what happens when he doesn't achieve the impossible. There is always the chance he'll eventually be caught.

The brother of a wife killed by Jerry, and the entire family slaughtered also, is a cop out to get him. Jerry would continue pursuing the ideal family, according to his warped mind, no matter how many would die during this continued failed search.

And Jerry's temper tantrums are epic in his basement workshop. You get the rabid dog just barely contained behind the somewhat controlled facade in the scenes in the basement. I think any of us realizes, particularly after seeing the mayhem left behind in the last slaughter, that all it takes is enough provocation. He has to be stopped. It's a must.

The delicious Schoelen is the unruly stepdaughter who won't submit to his desperate need for the perfect family. She senses something off about him, even seeing an outburst in the basement. She requested a picture of the killer behind the butchering of the reported family and Jerry finds it in the mail. So now he's suspicious of her. Add the psychiatrist of Schoelen's hoping to help her figure out what the deal is with O'Quinn, and the ideal family under threat once again, the evil just won't stay caged for long.

Hack is a really good actress, but she is more or less the wife left oblivious to what her daughter actually surmises. The psychiatrist pays with his life when his questions posing as a potential buyer of a house Jerry, now a real estate agent, is selling, but Schoelen won't stop no matter how hard her stepdad tries to throw her scent off...such as using a different face in a photograph in an envelope replacing his own.

You know, this could just have been a one-note slasher film much like the second sequel to "The Stepfather", called "Make Room for Daddy", but O'Quinn as the multi-layered psychopath--who can't seem to outrun the past nor create the perfect family unit he so covets, because what you do before leaves behind something to eventually implicate you, not to mention, the unrealistic expectations of what could never be realized--is so damn good, so riveting and frightening, he lifts this film way above what could have been just another run-of-the-mill exploitation flick in the suburbs. That third film is what "The Stepfather" could have been.

But Joseph Ruben actually shows Jerry after he accesses that Hack and Schoelen isn't fitting the mould he thought would work preparing for the next family. It is a chilling process where fitting himself for a new disguise and "role" is seen carefully and ingeniously built and developed. This is nothing new. He's done it before and will continue if unabated.

The autumnal time of the year this film is shot is absolutely perfect. The music I am not all that crazy about...a bit generic and not that atmospheric unfortunately.

The ending always fascinated me. Before presumably dying from a direct stab from a butcher knife [natch], O'Quinn says to Schoelen he loves her. And this is that film you actually see Schoelen naked before a shower. But my favorite scene has Jerry forgetting his name after creating another one he uses through a tongue/mind slip...this leads to his switch into murder mode. O'Quinn does outburst temper tantrum psycho extremely well.