Here The Stepfather becomes yet another in the mountain of 00s remakes of horror films from the 1970s and 80s. Others amidst these have included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Toolbox Murders (2003), Willard (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Amityville Horror (2005), Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), The Fog (2005), Black Christmas (2006), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Omen (2006), Sisters (2006), When a Stranger Calls (2006), The Wicker Man (2006), Halloween (2007), The Hitcher (2007), April Fool’s Day (2008), Day of the Dead (2008), It’s Alive (2008), Prom Night (2008), Friday the 13th (2009), The Last House on the Left (2009), My Bloody Valentine (2009), Night of the Demons (2009), Sorority Row (2009), And Soon the Darkness (2010), The Crazies (2010), I Spit on Your Grave (2010), Mother’s Day (2010), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Piranha (2010), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011), Fright Night (2011), Straw Dogs (2011) and The Thing (2011). The majority of these are no patch on their originals.

I had mixed feelings about the remake of The Stepfather. It is directed by Nelson McCormick who also made the disappointing remake of Prom Night. On the plus side, the script was written by J.S. Carone, who did write the remake of Prom Night, but had elsewhere made a number of smart psycho-thrillers as director with the likes of Shadowzone (1990), A Climate for Killing (1991), Shadowhunter (1993), Black Day, Blue Night (1995), Exit in Red (1996), Outside Ozona (1998), The Forsaken (2001), Mummy an’ the Armadillo (2005), 8MM2 (2005) and Wicked Little Things (2006). There was also the interesting casting choice of Dylan Walsh as Terry O’Quinn’s replacement in the title role. I have admired Walsh in one of my favourite tv series of the moment Nip/Tuck (2003-10) where he plays the role of an earnest nice guy and family man, something that is almost at 180 degrees remove from the flinty cleverness of O’Quinn in the original. The idea of the kind of bland sincerity that Dylan Walsh plays there given a nasty undertow seemed to make for perfect casting. On the other hand, The Stepfather hovered in a distribution limbo for the better part of a year since mid-2008, which never bodes well for a film.

Nelson McCormick clearly sees himself as some specialist amid the 00s horror remake fad first with Prom Night and then The Stepfather but the disappointing news that someone needs to inform him is that he has little affinity for the genre and his directorial moves are hackneyed and formulaic. McCormick’s generation of jumps and tension here is so frustratingly predictable – stale shots like cats jumping out into the screen, people creeping through the house as others unexpectedly pop out – that one wants to throw things at the screen. This is a film where one can predict everything that is going to happen from the outset. By contrast, the original never concerned itself with any of these cookie-cutter suspense devices. The original was also an acting tour-de-force that made the name of the then-unknown Terry O’Quinn. Disappointingly, Dylan Walsh is no adequate replacement. While Terry O’Quinn’s mercurial changes were frightening, Dylan Walsh’s are all by the numbers.

J.S. Cardone’s script has rung up a number of changes on the original. There are a number of updatings – things are brought into the era of cellular phones, while instead of being hunted by an obsessed detective, the stepfather’s likeness now appears on America’s Most Wanted (1998– ). J.S. Cardone also brings out one issue that was a logic bugbear about the original – how does the stepfather manage to keep setting up all of these identities around the country without IRS numbers, driver’s licenses, photo ID and so on, and makes this into one of the hinges of tension in the story. On the other hand, Cardone’s script is missing in any of the dark satire on Family Values that the original held, while all of the stepfather’s blackly funny lines have gone out the window. Where the original was relatively sparing in its body count, Cardone and McCormick have pumped up a number of supporting characters – the addition of the paranoid old lady across the street, Sela Ward’s ex/the children’s father and Paige Turco as Dylan Walsh’s employer – so as to create more opportunity to bump people off throughout.

To little purpose, the role of the teenager who becomes dissatisfied with the stepfather is now played by a guy instead of a girl. This gives the film an interestingly different central thrust where the relationship between the two turns into Dylan Walsh making bland homilies about male bonding. Turning the teenager into a guy also eliminates the creepy overtones of the stepfather trying to control his stepdaughter’s sexuality the original had, giving little frisson, for instance, to the scene where Dylan Walsh freaks out when he sees Penn Badgley kissing Amber Heard. Moreover, Nelson McCormick has made the disastrous mistake of trying to pitch The Stepfather to the teen horror demographic. This means that the opening scene that pulls back and shows Dylan Walsh having slaughtered an entire family now comes without any blood (he presumably having poisoned them all off!) because the film has a PG-13 rating. This also means that the film is now preening to the teen audience with shots of Penn Badgley’s buffed body in swimming trunks and Amber Heard parading about in a bikini. In placing the focus on good looking young leads, this means the troubled background that had Penn Badgley sent to military school is mentioned in all of two lines – a troubled teen with authority issues dealing with the stepfather could have been a strong source of dramatic tension but a film like this is unable make its teen hero too anti-heroic or anti-authoritarian. Unfortunately, selling The Stepfather as a teen film also means that all the undertones of dark satire of the original and its black inversion of the notion of Family Values goes completely over the head of its teen audience. Now all that we have is just another psycho film of no distinction.