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Stepford Children, The
Stepford Children, The (1987) Movie Poster
USA  •    •  96m  •    •  Directed by: Alan J. Levi.  •  Starring: Barbara Eden, Don Murray, Tammy Lauren, Pat Corley, Ken Swofford, Richard Anderson, Sharon Spelman, James Staley, Raye Birk, Debbie Barker, Dick Butkus, James Coco, Randall Batinkoff.  •  Music by: Joseph Conlan.
       Steven and Laura Harding (along with their kids David and Mary) have moved to the quiet community of Stepford, CT. Steven joins the men's club, which is still assimilating their wives into robots. This time, they have begun to turn their out of control teens into robots as well. Once they are assimilated, they are obedient, homework loving, big band dancing droids. Laura, David, and Mary stumble onto this mystery, and they must avoid Steven's plans to turn them into robots.

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Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
Image from: Stepford Children, The (1987)
The Stepford Children starts as the Harding family leave the big city for the final time & head for the small peaceful town of Stepford where they plan to settle down, Steven Harding (Don Murray) used to live in Stepford some seventeen years ago & is familiar with the town although his wife Laura (Barbara Eden) & their two teenage children Mary (Tammy Lauren) & David (Randall Batinkoff) have no experience of Stepford themselves. At first Stepford seems perfect, the ideal place to raise a family & live but it becomes clear that Stepford is too perfect & hides a sinister secret. David meets Lois (Debbie Barker) at school & the two quickly become an item but Lois remarks at how her mother has suddenly changed, then Lois undergoes the sudden change to an emotionless shell & David becomes suspicious. It seems that the men of Stepford are replacing their wives & children with perfect robot replicas & David is next on the list...

Directed by Alan J. Levi this second made for television sequel to The Stepford Wives (1975) came seven years after our last visit in Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980) & adds nothing to the formula firmly established by the original two films & is one of the dullest films I have sat through in quite some time & to describe The Stepford Children as a slow burner would be an understatement. Sure, the wives of Stepford are given a break this time around & the Stepford children are the ones killed & replaced by so-called perfect robots to fulfill their father's idealogical desires & aspirations but it makes little difference in the end, the same sort of themes & ideas are brought up yet again with the basic notion of a necessity for human emotion & feeling. Boring. Unoriginal. Dull. Take your pick. At over an hour & a half The Stepford Children takes ages to go anywhere, one big problem is that if you are anyway familiar with original The Stepford Wives novel or film then surely you will know what's going on straight away & the attempt by the script to turn the story into a mystery thriller falls down flat on it's face. I just sat there waiting for The Stepford Children to get going but it never did, I sat there waiting to get the robot reveal out of the way early on as surely not many audiences would be totally unaware with the concept behind The Stepford Wives but it plays it incredibly seriously until the very end & tries to maintain an air of mystery, suspense & surprise which it never can hope to as it's not original or well written enough. A real bore of a film that feels like a family drama for an hour as kids rebel against their parents & the system of conformity with less than satisfying results, the character's are poor, the dialogue is forgettable & nowhere near enough happens. One to avoid unless you have insomnia.

While the first hour & a bit are dull drama the last ten or fifteen minutes veers into sci-fi horror territory with a laboratory of half human half robots that look quite bad, the special effects budget was obviously minimal & at the very end all they seem to do is just tap the Harding's car window & nothing else despite everything being set-up for a big final showdown. There's no real excitement, action, tension, suspense or gore to speak of & even the story is illogical. If Steven replaced David wouldn't his wife Laura have noticed? If all the Stepford child are to be replaced who would carry on the Men's Association? Do robot's grow old? How would Stepford explain an eternally young population that never aged? What do these Stepford men do with the dead bodies of the people they replace with robot's? The Speford Children as a film is frankly as dull, emotionless & bland as it's title character's. Not good.

Made for the NBC television network the entire thing has a very forgettable look, there's no style here & nothing of any great interest happens. The acting is bland, no-one stands out & the cast look bored.

The Stepford Children is a really, really boring film that takes ages to repeat the theme's & ideas of the original & goes nowhere with them itself. It doesn't even try to add anything to the mix other than the robotic children angle which plays out exactly the same as the robotic wives angle anyway. Followed by yet another made for television sequel The Stepford Husbands (1996).

Review by Paul Andrews (poolandrews@hotmail.com) from UK from the Internet Movie Database.

 
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