The Stepmother is a 1972 erotic thriller released through Crown International so you’re expecting standard drive-in fodder.
Structurally this movie is as much a police procedural as an erotic thriller and it can also be regarded as an inverted mystery, in which the viewer knows the identity of the murderer right from the start and the interest of the story lies in the way in which the killer is brought to justice.
The movie opens with a woman having sex with a man somewhat against her will. This encounter is witnessed by a man whom we presume to be the woman’s jealous husband. The husband then kills the other man.
I’m not giving away any spoilers here. This all happens in the first few minutes.
This movie adds an interesting twist. There’s a second murder at roughly the same time and it would be obvious to even the greenest cop that the two murders are related. That’s the one thing in the case that is an absolute certainty. Inspector Darnezi (John Anderson) has no doubts on this score.
I’m not giving away any spoilers here either. All of this is just the initial setup.
That jealous husband is architect Frank Delgado (Alejandro Rey). The woman we saw at the start is his second wife Margo (Catherine Justice). Frank is successful and he and Margo are part of a little circle of rich people with slightly arty tendencies. There’s a hint of early 70s Southern California decadence. This was a world in which drugs and bed-hopping were popular pastimes in such circles. Frank doesn’t quite fit in. He’s Mexican and he’s a devout Catholic.
This little circle includes Frank’s business partner Dick Hill (Larry Linville) and Dick’s wife Sonya (Marlene Schmidt) as well as a maker of blue movies who goes by the name of Goof and Goof’s girlfriend.
There are some tensions. For one thing Frank isn’t entirely sure he can trust Margo not to sleep around.
Things get more complicated when Frank’s son Steve (Rudy Herrera Jr) arrives from Mexico. There’s definitely tension between Steve and Margo. Maybe not surprising given that Steve’s stepmother isn’t all that older than he is and she’s very hot and she’s a woman in touch with her sexual appetites.
There’s also another killing.
We know that events are moving towards a crisis and Avedis handles the sense of impending doom quite well. We don’t know what form the crisis will take. There are several distinct possibilities.
The plot is a bit loose. Avedis’s screenplay has a few clunky moments.
The biggest problem is that it’s all very tame. The ingredients were there for a steamy erotic thriller and in the 80s or early 90s that’s how it would have played out (and that’s certainly how an Italian director would have approached it). The Stepmother however never develops any real erotic heat and never really catches fire. It’s not quite sleazy enough.
Alejandro Rey is good as a man on the edge. His life is out of control. Catherine Justice is pretty good as Margo although the script doesn’t give her enough opportunities to smoulder.
Directed Howard Avedis was born Hikmet Labib Avedis in Iraq. He directed several movies in Iraq before relocating to the United States where he produced and directed a series of low-budget movies. He gets virtually no respect as a film-maker, being generally dismissed as a director of cheap drive-in trash. That’s rather unfair. I’ve now seen three of his movies and they’re rather interesting and slightly offbeat. Both The Teacher (1974) and The Fifth Floor are worth seeing.
The Stepmother is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest. Not as good as the other Howard Avedis movies I’ve seen but it’s enjoyable in a 70s drive-in movie way. Recommended.
It’s included in several multi-movie DVD sets from Mill Creek. The transfer is very good.