Stepfather 3 (1992)

By now we must know this man isn’t going to die! Only this time, well he has - sort of. Terry Quinn clearly read the script and decided to sit this out, ergo “Jerry” now becomes “Keith” (Robert Wightman). He has escaped from a not so high-security institution, had some plastic surgery and headed for the unsuspecting “Davis” family. That’s mom “Christine” (Priscilla Barnes) and her wheelchair-bound, terrapin-keeping, young son “Andy” (David Tom). It’s actually the latter character who begins to smell a rat as his new father makes a few slip ups which he confides to local priest (John Ingle). Sadly, though, his dog-collar proves little protection as the growing body count takes us nicely to a finale in a nursery equipped with loads of shears, pitch-forks, hoes and one those industrial-scale tree shredders. Sadly, nobody thought to put the script in there first, and/or the notes from the casting session as for almost two hours we are subjected to something feeble and predictable. For horror to work, I think, it has to be vaguely plausible but here the whole scenario is nonsense from start to finish. This wasn’t a very strong franchise to start with, but by now we are well and truly squeezing the dregs from an idea that should never have got off the (very small) drawing board. The denouement is actually not just ridiculous but I also think quite philosophically dangerous too, but to be honest I can’t recommend that you ever get anywhere near that far.