The Stepfather | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

Horror remake has more tension than blood.

The genre has diverged into two paths: the brutally gruesome and the suspenseful. This is going for the latter, which would have been fine if it were in fact thrilling.

Any subtlety or implicit social satire to be found in Joseph Ruben's original went out with the last neighborhood trash pickup. Too bad the service was canceled before it could haul away this waste-of-time remake. [Blu-ray]

Not so much a contemporary re-make of Joseph Ruben's 1987 psychological thriller as a lobotomised bastard step-child: over-plotted, over-long, and stripped of the original's sharp, satirical subversion of suburban family values.