The Stepmother

Cinema Monolith: 2/10
IMDb: 4/10
Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide: *½ out of 4

Released on October 26, 1972
Rated R
94 minutes

Directed by Hikmet L. Avedis

Written by Hikmet L. Avedis

Cast: Alejandro Rey, Catherine Justice, Larry Linville, Marlene Schmidt, John D. Garfield, Claudia Jennings, John Anderson, Duncan McLeod, Mike Kulcsar, Rudy Herrera Jr, David Renard, Priscilla Garcia

Let’s see…a husband arrives home to find his wife post-sacktime with another man; the husband strangles the man, buries him, then…well, after that I didn’t know what was going on. Apparently, this was a story about relationships and infidelity, and maybe even a little wife swapping, but it seemed to be wrapped in the guise of a murder mystery; trysts, affairs, and hook-ups were the going thing among these fun-loving adults, while killing was something you did in the meantime.

And stuck in the middle of it all was Alejandro Rey, recently graduated from the Ricardo Montalban School of Fine Acting, playing Delgado, a mixed-up architect whose lack of tolerance for his wife’s catting around resulted in not one but two senseless murders; the two-man police force somehow had a whale of a time tagging him with the crime, even though dozens of clues pointing right at him were as obvious as signal flares. Soon enough, I was bored out of my mind, but I couldn’t look away, only because I was afraid I might miss something vitally important that would make sense of it all.

Trust me, this movie was extremely odd, even by drive-in standards, and based on the lame way the title connected to the story, this could’ve been called The Cabin or The Shovel and made just as much sense. Hikmet L. Avedis—which surprisingly is not an anagram—directed as if he’d never watched a film in his life, and his work on the screenplay was strictly amateur hour. Scenes played out far too casually, seemingly without a destination, then suddenly everything took a hard left turn to an entirely unrelated conclusion, leaving the story we’d invested 70 minutes in behind.

Also, the use of camera tricks, like the dozen or so baffling and obnoxious freeze-frames, were either hilarious or a nuisance, depending on your current disposition. And speaking of baffling: Larry Linville took a break from M*A*S*H, Claudia Jennings took a break from Playboy, and—hold on to your antacid—the film took a break from reality by being nominated for an Academy Award, for Best Original Song (I kid you not!). The least entertaining—so far—from my Drive-In Cult Classics collection.  (2/10)