Welcome to Deer View, CA, where police forces don't exist (or people don't ever call them), where locals can go missing without anyone ever looking for them, and where it's still perfectly normal for a young boy to be best friends with an elderly priest! All in all, the ideal spot for the serial killer with the weirdest modus operandi in the history of horror cinema to start over again. Terry O'Quinn didn't want to depict the crazed stepfather for the third time, but the script ingeniously resolves this little complication. During the sinister opening credits - shot through an odd blue filter - we witness how our escaped psycho undergoes clandestine plastic surgery by a clandestine surgeon. You can recognize clandestine surgeons because they smoke whilst operating.
Enter the utterly anti-charismatic Robert Wightman, who assumes the fake identity Keith Grant and rapidly finds fitting victims for his favorite game: courting a single mother and posing as the perfect stepfather for her children; - in this case a psychosomatic crippled boy. And if someone grows suspicious? Well, then stepdaddy murders them with a shovel.
There are two possible ways to look at "Stepfather III". As a lousy and redundant 90s sequel, in which the suspense and creativity of the 1987 semi-classic are replaced by extremely sick and gratuitous gore. Undeniably, the plot is full of holes, the script full of clichés and predictable twists (from the moment we learn the boy's illness is psychosomatic, you just know he will walk at the end. I don't even consider that a spoiler). On the other hand, you could also state it's an unscrupulous and incredibly amusing slasher with all the right ingredients. The latter is how I remember "Stepfather III", for sure! My advice would be to ignore all the dumb things the characters do and say, and just massively enjoy the vile and unhinged murder sequences. The climax, involving an industrial threshing machine, is so tremendously over-the-top I couldn't stop grinning. Try to plastic surgery yourself out of that, ha!
