Revenge of the Stepford Wives (dir. Robert Fuest, 1980)
Revenge of the Stepford Wives isn’t as spectacular as its title would have you believe, despite the fact that it does end with a retributive murder. The title would have you believe that Joanna and all the other Stepford wives have somehow survived, eyeless, to wreak revenge on their husbands, but no. We’re starting from scratch here.
Sharon Gless from “Burn Notice” plays Kaye Foster, a feisty New York reporter who has come to Stepford to investigate why no one has moved away from the town in over a decade. She too finds that all the women are placid and robotic, and whose interests don’t extend too far past a clean kitchen. There is a lot of appliance fetish in this movie, and there are many loving shots of toasters and vacuum cleaners and the like. There’s even a scene late in the film wherein Julie Kavner storms madly about a kitchen turning on blenders and toasters. It’s meant to be a chilling moment, but it only plays as silly.
Kaye finds that all the women in Stepford claim to have a thyroid condition, and that they all take mysterious pills four times a day, prompted by a horrible town-wide siren. Kaye also teams up with Julie Kavner, who has just moved to Stepford with her husband, played by famed superhunk Don Johnson, a full four years before “Miami Vice.” Kavner and Gless poke around about the pills, and wonder what’s going on.
There’s no mystery this time, though. Johnson and the town patriarch Wally (Mason Adams) have open conversations about “converting” the wives, and how the pills are needed to keep them in line. Perhaps this was a comment on rampant prescription drug abuse in suburbia (a real problem, from what I understand), but it feels more like lazy writing to me. You see in this version of The Stepford Wives, the women are not replaced by bio-bots. They are instead brainwashed by a giant hair-dryer-looking machine. We see it happen to Kavner. The pills keep them placid.
Gless overhears the evil plans in one scene, and learns that to undo the brainwashing, all you need to do is deny a woman her pills, feed her a little bit of booze, and drive her out of town. I guess the argument, then, is that liquor is better for a domestic slave than prescription pills. Gless breaks Kavner of her spell, and confronts Wally.
Gless hits the take-your-pills siren many times in a row, which makes the wives of Stepford – for unexplained reasons – bottom out their drugs, and gather at Wally’s house to murder him. They stop him to death with their high heels. Since the film ends immediately thereafter, I’m left confused as to what really went on. Did the women go mad from taking too many pills? Did they break their own brainwashing and go on a murderousrevenge spree? And how is Don Johnson going to explain himself to Julie Kavner now that’s she’s definitely free of the Men’s Association influence? Sadly, we see none of this.
The next film will be familiar to anyone who saw Disturbing Behavior in 1998.
