Released this week on DVD: "The Stepfather"

Grade: C-

There is more to Dylan Walsh than his warm and fuzzy Nip/Tuck character, Dr. Sean McNamara, a blue-eyed St. Bernard of a plastic surgeon oozing sincerity as he wields a scalpel like a magic wand. In The Stepfather, a clumsy remake of the 1987 cult thriller, his character, who goes by the pseudonym David Harris, is more like Sean's Mephistophelean partner on Nip/Tuck, Dr. Christian Troy (Julian McMallon).

Impersonating an empathetic, Sean-like dreamboat, David preys on attractive single-women with children. Masquerading as the idea potential stepdad, he insinuates his way into broken families, promising to be a healer. When the mother and children don't live up to his fantasies of what the perfect family should be (which is strictly patriarchal, I should add), his sociopathic fury erupts, and he butchers them before moving on and repeating the cycle.

In The Stepfather Walsh's features freeze into a mask of homicidal cunning, and the St. Bernard turns into a mad dog. From the moment he sets his eyes on Susan Harding (Sela Ward), a divorced mother of two, in a Portland, Ore., grocery store, he exudes a malevolent, barely concealed paranoia. One of his first ploys is to deliver a sickeningly unctuous spiel about the importance of family.

Because the movie's opening scene observes David calmly shaving before he leaves a house littered with the corpses from his latest massacre, The Stepfather offers few surprises. You keep waiting until Susan's children -- the teenager Michael (Penn Badgley from Gossip Girl) and the younger brother, Sean (Braeden Lemasters) -- catch on to him.

In the first sign of trouble, David overreacts to the younger boy's playing of a noisy video game. In the second, more serious sign, Mrs. Cutter (Nancy Linehan Charles), the eccentric cat-loving woman from across the street, mentions seeing a sketch of a man resembling David on America's Most Wanted. She is not long for this world.

The movie updates the story for the age of the Internet and the cellphone, when the click of a mouse can show the sketch from that television show and phones have memory cards. Two decades after the original movie, the notion that a serial killer of entire families could repeatedly disappear and start over as easily as David seems to be able to do is extremely far-fetched. The final showdown during a thunderstorm (of course!) is by the numbers.

When not half-heartedly evoking menace, The Stepfather fills the screen with eye candy, using repeated shots of Badgley and Amber Heard, who plays his girlfriend, Kelly, lounging around in bathing suits, taking showers and cuddling.