Director: Howard Avedis
Writer: Howard Avedis
From: Cult Cinema
A man’s life spirals out of control after he murders a client he catches raping his wife.
Back to Howard Avedis, director of Separate Ways, The Teacher and The Specialist. This is the final film of his that I have on these sets so just going to pull the band-aid off here quick as I can. And I will admit here that it took two hours to start watching this after writing that sentence. And then another day to finish it after writing that sentence.
So the movie starts with marital rape. Oh, it’s not marital, it’s someone who’s having an affair with her. Wait, no, we learn later in the movie that it was rape, but the movie’s both brushing it off as nothing and playing it as an infidelity. It’s… strange. Big surprise I took so long to finish this.
Her husband comes home, sees the naked silhouettes in the window, and murders the guy as he leaves. As the husband leaves to bury the body, an upbeat salsa-inflected song starts up over the credits. Yeah, cause we need to set a peppy tone for this movie. Also, as he finishes burying the body, a couple shows up, she tells her partner she doesn’t want to have sex, so he starts beating her. The husband drives away. What a cheery piece. The woman gets strangled, just like the husband’s victim, and the cops find both bodies the next day and are trying to figure out the case.
Despite being called The Stepmother, we don’t even learn that the wife is a stepmother until about 45, 50 minutes into the movie. The movie poster says, “She forced her husband’s son to commit the ultimate sin!!” giving the impression that the movie is about step-cest (and why I was so disinclined to watch it). Instead, it’s a variation on Crime and Punishment with the husband being hounded by both the police and his own guilt.
As the movie goes on, he suspects his business partner of having an affair with his wife and accidentally kills him. The partner’s widow, against the husband’s wishes, joins him on a trip to Mexico where they hook up. Meanwhile, back in the house, the wife rapes the stepson.
When the husband comes home, the cop confronts him with the shovel that was used to bury the body. The husband heads up to the cabin where he catches his wife in bed with his son. He gets a gun from the glove compartment of the car, his son asks for forgiveness, and the husband admits to murdering the rapist from the start. He’s decided to turn himself in and, as he’s handing the gun to his son, the cops show up, see him with a gun, and shoot him to death. THE END
The high point of the film for me was the husband accidentally killing his friend by shoving him off a roof. I laughed out loud at that. Also, earlier in the film, the husband is haunted by visions of his first murder victim constantly approaching from behind sand dunes and the ocean. If I made GIFs, I’d make a GIF of that sequence to share as, “Whenever a woman posts to the Internet,” and have “Well actually” hovering over the guy.
I will admit to not giving this movie a fair shake. The plot is fine, even interesting in its own way, and the movie handles it well enough. Except for raping the stepson, all the characters’ actions make sense. You can see they’re making mistakes, but it’s clear who’s lacking which bits of information. They aren’t making poor choices, they’re being undone by the situation. Also, the problem can’t be solved by talking it out. All the issues are difficult and fraught and there’s really no way that this won’t end in disaster.
However, that movie poster (and Avedis’ previous films) had me in a preparatory cringe the entire movie waiting for that, “Yeah, nope!” moment that does eventually arrive. Only it’s not what the movie’s about or even that major an incident within the film. Much like Separate Ways, this is being presented as an exploitation film when it’s just a straightforward drama.
The sexual politics are pretty frustrating. I mean, the inciting incident is a rape and that’s never quite taken seriously. Even when the husband is told that, yes, she had sex with his murder victim but that it was rape, he still says she killed his pride. Given that the murder victim is killed before he has any real lines, we don’t get a sense of who he was as a character and the movie never tells us how to feel. The murder victims are neither mourned nor condemned, they just vanish. If there’d been just one moment of characters talking about the rapist and saying, “that prick,” we’d know the movie wasn’t on his side. Instead it’d be clear that the morality of the movie is focused on the tragedy being inflicted on this couple by this rapist.
Instead the mom rapes her stepson and the husband is shot by the cops so… justice? Skip it.
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