Stepfather III: Father's Day

Stars: Robert Wightman (Impulse), Priscilla Barnes (TV's "Three's Company", License To Kill), Season Hubley (Hardcore). Using ye-olde-plastic-surgery routine, Robert Wightman replaces the much more effective Terry O'Quinn (The Stepfather, Stepfather 2) in this third outing for the wayward psycho who's just looking for a family he can love and be loved by in return. This time out, the stepfather (Wightman) descends on a suburban haven, gets a job as a gardener in a local nursery, and gloms onto Christine (Priscilla Barnes), a divorcee with a wheelchair bound son named Andy. Andy becomes suspicious relatively quickly, and since he's a budding computer hacker with incredible access (he hooks into the DMV in a couple of states without even blinking), he's able to stumble onto some fairly incriminating evidence. Meanwhile, Andy's standoffishness has the stepfather in a tiff, and he starts checking out newcomer Jennifer (Season Hubley) and her son Nicky. As you might guess, trying to secretly be a father to two families applies a little more stress than this rather unhealthy egg is able to bear: the stepfather cracks, the results are messy, but justice prevails in the end. By all rights there shouldn't be a 4th entry in this series; but then again the dude was stabbed in the ticker umpteen times in the first two films, so who can say? The first one was a genuine thriller sleeper; the second was more of the same on a much smaller budget and just looked cheap; the third looks the slickest, but suffers from the loss of O'Quinn. Audience: Fans of the series will most likely want to check this out, but dramatically it's the weakest.