The Test of Time: Stepfather II: Make Room For Daddy (1989)

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

We all have certain movies we love. Movies we respect without question because of either tradition, childhood love, or because they’ve always been classics. However, as time keeps ticking, do those classics still hold up? Do they remain must see? So…the point of this column is to determine how a film holds up for a modern horror audience, to see if it stands the Test of Time.

DIRECTED BY JEFF BURR

STARRING TERRY O'QUINN, MEG FOSTER, JONATHAN BRANDIS, CAROLINE WILLIAMS

Say now, where are all our fellow Terry O’Quinn fans at? You know, every horror fan’s favorite sinister Stepfather? Yeah, that sick bastard…we love this guy like he was a part of our own damn family!

And believe it or not, this month marks the 30th anniversary of Terry O’Quinn’s reprisal of the titular, totally unhinged patriarch in STEPFATHER II: MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY (what a perfect title by the way). Director Jeff Burr (FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM, NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW) takes the reins from Joseph Ruben, who directed the OG STEPFATHER two years prior. And yet, tonally, the morbidly dark sense of humor and mordantly stark sense of horror is almost the same as it was in the first flick. While the original is hailed as a minor-masterpiece among certain horror circles, it’s time to find out if the sequel deserves a similar ranking 30 years after its release. Ladies, gents, let’s assess STEPFATHER II vs. The Test of Time below!

THE STORY: Produced over four months, director Jeff Burr was asked to direct the film before a script was even written. Moreover, the film was originally slated to be a cheap, throwaway direct-to-video release, but when producers saw the quality end-result, the flick was given a proper theatrical release. Story-wise, the narrative resumes the deeply duplicitous exploits of Jerry Blake, who, at the beginning of the film, is interned at Puget Sound Psychiatric Hospital in Washington State. Jerry, the master of mendacity, easily convinces his doctors that he is on the path of reformation. It doesn’t take much to believe him, as Jerry has that square, “Leave it to Beaver” yuppie mien that not a single soul would detect as harmful. Oh, but inimically evil Jerry is, indeed, and soon he mounts a daring escape by jousting a small blade into his doctor’s neck and bludgeoning the dopey security guard to death.

Desperate to resume his sociopathic MO, Jerry makes his way to Palm Meadow Estates outside of Los Angeles. All Jerry wants is to find a perfect family that lives up to his standard, one that he can protect and provide for, so he can attain the idealistic American dream of a happy life. Jerry assumes the identity of a dead publisher named Gene, pretends to be a marriage counselor and begins seeing aggrieved spouses unhappy with their husbands. This includes Carol (Meg Foster), who lives across the street from Jerry with her lonely prepubescent son, Todd (Jonathan Brandis). Things go well for a while until Carol’s best friend Matty (Caroline Williams) begins to suspect something amiss with Gene, and when Carol’s estranged husband Phil (Mitchell Laurance) shows up looking to make amends, things go from calm and serene to manically murderous in a quick hurry!

WHAT HOLDS-UP: There’s still quite a lot to appreciate when watching STEPFATHER II in 2019, but none of it would matter without one thing: Terry O’Quinn’s performance! Honestly, the reason these STEPFATHER movies work is because of the pitch-perfect understanding of the material by O’Quinn and his dedicated effort to strike just the right balance in the performance. The way O’Quinn so beautifully and subtly toes the line between deadpan gravity and over-the-top hilarity is truly second to none. The tight-roped tonality of the movie is reverberated with crystal clarity by O’Quinn’s fine-tuned turn. Externally, Blake is a man of measure and upstanding countenance. He appears solemn, dutiful and completely normal by society’s standards. Internally, however, Blake is a seething cauldron of disappointment and a soulless shell of constantly dissatisfied rage. O’Quinn plays both sides of the sociopathic coin with an inherent understanding of what makes it work. His deeply felt solemnity for wanting nothing more than a family to care for, mixed with uncontrollably lethal violence he exacts when failing to do so, is where Terry shines the most, and where STEPFATHER II functions best.

Take for instance the heartfelt scenes between ‘O’Quinn and the late Jonathan Brandis. They work on a basic level of veracity that allows us to sympathize with young Todd. Whether he’s having a heart-to-heart chat with Todd in the kitchen or teaching him how to throw a baseball, how both actors play the scenes comes off very believable. Watching the movie now is particularly tough to see Brandis, knowing his off-screen fate, as his unease is very apparent. But Brandis uses the downbeat energy for the performance, which, especially when playing opposite O’Quinn, makes the end of the movie all the more heartrending. Oh, and we’d be remiss not to mention how hilarious O’Quinn’s facial expressions are when watching the instructional dating videotape and his repulsed reactions to various women’s sexual desires. It reinforces how, as Gene barks at Carol late in the film, “I even had sex with you for Christ’s sake!” that the Stepfather’s drug is not sexual gratification, but rather control.

What also still kicks major ass is the assortment of death-modes Gene exacts throughout. There’s nothing more boring than a psycho-killer slaughtering his victims in the precise same way each time, and knowing this, Burr gives Gene a wide array of lethal weapons to keep the action fresh. Not to go through each one by one, but Gene uses everything from pin-blades and hammers to wine bottles and wet-towels for strangulation, never making the mistake of using the same murder-weapon on multiple victims. The variety of death-dealings in the film attribute to the movie’s entertainment value holding up over the past 30 years.

The best death of the bunch is undoubtedly that of Matty, Carol’s best friend. First of all, she’s the most sympathetic victim in the film. She legitimately has Carol’s back and works tirelessly to prove her suspicion that Gene is up to no good. So when she does the investigative work to determine Jerry stole the identity of a black man named Gene, we fully appreciate her efforts. But then, in a wonderfully drawn-out sequence of tension and suspense, Matty cannot escape Jerry’s sneaky B&E home-invasion, which culminates in Jerry strangling Matty with a wet towel and hanging her ass out to dry…to death!

The second-best death has to be that of the titular monster though. Not only is the wedding finale a great way to cap the film, but also having Todd be the one to fatally stab Jerry to death is a bold and ballsy move (as in, I don’t even want to know what that did to Brandis’ impressionable psychology). By this time in the story we’ve completely sided with Todd, so to see him bid a bloody and baleful farewell to the man that is NOT his father, is satisfying in ways most horror finales simply are not.

WHAT BLOWS NOW: The aforementioned difficulty of seeing young Brandis sort of sucks nowadays, particularly in the way he seems so unhappy in the movie. Call if great acting or life imitates art, but no pleasure is had to see a tragic figure like that all these years later. But where the movie truly suffers now is in the cheap gore that was added in reshoots after those gratuitous Weinsteins wanted a bloodier film to market. If you look closely, O’Quinn doesn’t even appear in these lamely shoehorned shots, as he downright refused to participate in them. Rightly so! The result is a series of dumbass shots of blood randomly splattering across a lamp, floor, ceiling, etc. The point is that this movie does not need or depend on excessive gore to work. STEPFATHER has never been about visual bloodletting, but rather internal blood-boiling. Jerry’s blood boiling to the temperature of hell is what these movies are all about, and his inability to control it.

THE VERDICT: 30 Years later, STEPFATHER II is still a model piece of parentage. Jeff Burr admirably retains the perfectly-balanced tone of the first film and continues the story seamlessly. The pacing is tight and focused and the movie skips by at an eminently watchable clip. The variety of death-modes and murder weapons keeps the horror-action from ever becoming too repetitive, and the wedding-set finale still plays as an effective pulse-pounding way to end the story. Of course, the single-most durable element of STEPFATHER II is the towering titular turn of Terry O’Quinn, who somehow brilliantly and believably marries the maniacal with the measured, the external stability with internal crumbling, and the outward decency with the inward psychosis!

GET STEPFATHER II ON DVD HERE