Penn Badgley

Indifference is, perhaps, one of the most frustrating attitudes one can have towards a film. If you love a film, singing its praises is a natural by-product. Hating a film can often times be an even more cathartic experience than loving a film, as vitriol is always easily on tap. But not particularly caring one way or the other? That's oddly frustrating for me.

The Stepfather, the most recent collaboration between producer J.S. Cardone and director Nelson McCormick (the last being their remake of Prom Night, a project I feel safe calling the most annoying horror film of 2008, and even that's being diplomatic), is another entry to a new Hollywood tradition of finding vaguely recognizable films from the 1980s and remaking them on the cheap. Now, I'm not one to bemoan this business model; it's fine if the end result has enough originality to it that there is at least the illusion that the film is something more than a commodity to draw in a big opening weekend.

Fortunately The Stepfather does have enough airiness to it and enough interesting performers in it to convince even a hardened cynic that money wasn't the only motivation for all involved, that creatively the team behind it did want to deliver to new audiences a story of the reverse-black widow, of a man who lulls vulnerable single-mothers into thinking he wants to join their family, only to bite their heads off (figuratively, there's no actual cannibalism involved) when their back is turned.