Welcome to B-Movie Enema.

You come to this place for movie reviews. Sometimes you get a laugh. Sometimes you might feel the pain I felt while watching a movie and you begin to cry. If you are some sort of weirdo that thinks heartbreak would feel good anywhere, then might I suggest you get the fuck out of here you goddamn monster?

We’ve been in this neighborhood before. Yes. Back in July, we took a trip to a scenic village to see what 1975’s The Stepford Wives was all about. We return again to check out the 2004 remake starring a pretty A-list cast of actors like Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, and Glenn Close. Not only do you have some pretty powerful actors involved but you also have the film being directed by Frank Oz.

But oh boy were there issues with this production.

Originally, this 2004 version of The Stepford Wives was intended to be a dark comedy that would play extremely satirical. That feels very in line with the original premise from Ira Levin’s novel and some of the intent of the 1975 movie. It was even shot that way, but man… Much like our Halloween special, the movie had to be put in front of test audiences. I swear, every time I hear about how test audiences scored a movie low and it scared the studio into ordering reshoots, my heart aches. Not every movie should be tested. Sometimes if a movie has a concept that leans on dark humor or satire, maybe just leave it as it was? I digress.

Yeah, so the test screenings did not go well. Not only was the movie a dark satire that was likely lost on a test audience, but it also featured a more downer of an ending similar to the 1975 movie. Once the reshoots started, it heavily affected the movie’s tone and changed some things in midstream that were impossible to fix in editing and timing. On top of that Frank Oz and several cast members including Kidman, Midler, Walken, and Close had issues. Oz even stated in an interview the year before it came out that he was hired to push the actors hard to get the best performances, but apparently, that just was not how the actors saw it. He did put a little attention onto Midler who he said had been stressed out around the time leading up to being in the film and she brought it with her onto set. That might not have been the best way to cop to having a tense production.

After the film’s release, Oz would take a lot of the blame for this movie. He would say that he was given too much money and he was playing things too safe out of concern for Paramount’s budget and investment in the production. He even admitted that if he had followed his instincts, the film would have turned out to be a better one. Matthew Broderick would also say that his time on set wasn’t particularly fun. Most of that had to do with him being handed a character that wasn’t that interesting to him, so it was just a bland experience and one that he would have hated to have been his final job in the industry.

This is very easily the standout bad movie on Oz’s resume. Considering what he did with the musical Little Shop of Horrors, or the Steve Martin-led comedies like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Bowfinger (the latter being a fantastic satire of Hollywood), or the well-appreciated In & Out, you would think he would have been the exact right guy to make a biting satire based on the immensely popular novel that actually did have things to say. I would be curious what some of that original script by Paul Rudnick was like. Rudnick was not just some schmuck that wrote this movie and it got made. No, he wrote Sister Act, Addams Family Values, Jeffrey, and Oz’s In & Out. He had a good track record even if the script he wrote immediately before The Stepford Wives was the abysmal Marci X.

One more thing I want to comment on that kind of ties together some of what was written above. Originally, Broderick and Midler’s characters of Walter and Bobbie were set to be played by John and Joan Cusack. Joan Cusack worked previously with Oz and Rudnick on In & Out which garnered her an Oscar nomination in 1998. She also was in Addams Family Values by Rudnick. If we think about the Bobbie character, previously played by Paula Prentiss, that’s actually pretty good casting. The siblings dropped out due to their father losing his battle with cancer. That’s what brought in the replacements. It’s not that I think Midler can’t play the Bobbie character (frankly, anyone could play Walter which lends credence to Broderick’s complaints about being an uninteresting character), but I do think her verbose personality works, however, she’s a little too old and not what I would picture for the role. Joan Cusack is a much better match for the role. If the movie had been made in the 80s or maybe early 90s, perhaps Midler would have been a decent choice, but still… I would’ve liked to have seen Joan Cusack’s performance.

I want to be fair here and say that while this 2004 version of The Stepford Wives was widely panned it wasn’t without some critical appraisal that was really useful for pull quotes for the DVD release. Gene Shalit of the Today Show said the movie “will have you screaming – with laughter!” Joel Siegel also commented on the movie being a “flat-out comedy” that he found very funny. Shalit and Siegel were very popular critics when I was younger. Then, you have my favorite of them all, Roger Ebert. Ebert awarded the movie a 3-star review and a thumbs up. That said, when he and co-host Richard Roeper did their annual worst lists, Ebert also said it would be one of the last movies he’d defend when Roeper confronted him with his positive review.

But… Is this version of The Stepford Wives really that bad? Is it worth the 26% Rotten Tomatoes score? Yeah, it is that bad, and, yes, it does deserve that score. We should still go through this beat-by-beat to be sure of what I’m already sure of.

Oh, thank fuck this is only 93 minutes long.

As this movie begins, I’m astonished that it took not one but TWO studios to shit out this turd. Sure, Paramount gets to have their logo first and have those all-important DVD release rights. Yet, DreamWorks is involved with this shit too. This movie, you might be surprised to read, cost somewhere between $90 and $100 MILLION to make. While it did break $100 million at the box office, that’s not enough when counting the marketing costs of releasing this in the summer of 2004.

Yeah, this movie was released on June 11, 2004. If you want to know how costly it would be for this movie to get any attention while it vies for an audience, Shrek 2 was released about 3 or 4 weeks ahead of this movie. Sure, not the same audience, but you still need to compete with eyeballs on the product. This movie was released the same day as Napoleon Dynamite, THE surprise hit of 2004. But worse, on June 4, Warner Brothers released Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This movie had a lot of competition for dollars and had to spend a whole lot to be noticed.

I will say the movie starts kind of wonderfully. The credits play alongside old films of women in mostly traditional roles as homemakers and such. If they aren’t directly tied to appliances or serving meals for husbands, they are used as models for appliances and cars and such. They are also shown in a lot of sexualized ways too. So we’re getting a lot of classic ideas of what women are in the male gaze. Since these are a lot of older films, like from the 50s, we see women in dresses and other feminine attire.

If there’s one thing I need to pick on right out of the gate is the opening titles’ score. David Arnold does the score for this. I’m a big David Arnold fan for what he did with James Bond scores in the 90s and 00s. This… is not his best. It’s bombastic and almost sounds like something in between a waltz and music that would be a better fit for a movie about witches. Which, now that I think about it… Maybe that was the point? Maybe these women are witches and need to be turned into robots or some such shit.

Anyway, I don’t like the music for these titles and I’m disappointed because the guy who wrote it is someone I have a lot of appreciation for.

We meet Kidman’s Joanna Eberhart (doing her very best Jodie Foster costuming). She is the head of the EBS network which is a very popular network that seems to promote a lot of female empowerment shows. She’s speaking to a lot of the network affiliates. It’s obviously mostly female heads of the affiliates. She shows clips for programs that basically belittle men. These are fairly funny. One is very inspired by The Weakest Link but it’s Meredith Vieira reading off all these awesome things that are very obviously done by the wife of a couple to prove that she is better than the man. Another is kind of Survivor-inspired but has a married couple spending time with more attractive people than their partner. The man, played by Mike White, stays with his wife after spending a week with a single stripper. Meanwhile, his wife, after spending a week with multiple hunks and porn star women, decides to dump him to keep the, uh, train a-rollin’ if you catch my drift.

That guy Mike White plays interrupts Joanna’s big moment. He wants to know why she did it. He loved his wife and she left him. Joanna spins it that the world will see the truth about his wife and will love him now for being free of her. He has a good idea for a show that he calls “Let’s Kill All the Women” and pulls a gun. He tries shooting Joanna but misses. He’s tackled to the floor and hauled away. Joanna is hardly phased by the incident. She’s more interested in the financial boon she will get from her girl boss shows.

You already see the problem here, right?

To put it mildly, Joanna is a cunt. In the original film, you have quite a bit of sympathy for Joanna. She is a metropolitan woman who has an equal say at the table with her husband. He makes decisions without her input and it rips her from her life and she is suddenly out in the boondocks with a less-than-suburban life. The women around her are conservative and weird. It’s a far cry from New York City.

In this version, she’s a capitalist scumbag who profits off of misery. Granted, she’s kind of a parody of this particular wave of feminism at the time that was very much a “girl boss/girl power” kind of movement. It’s over the top with how tribalistic the sentiment is. It’s very obviously a turning-the-tables sort of thing. Sure. Sure. I get what it’s trying to do. However, if we think about where this is going to end or what path her life will take once she’s in Stepford, does it make sense for her to be so harshly characterized at the onset?

I’m just saying it’s sort of bad form to portray a woman this badly when we should not want our leading woman to be deserving of a comeuppance.

Anyway, Hank (White), just before he came to the big announcement and tried to kill Joanna, visited his ex-wife, Barbara, and “five of her new boyfriends” and tried to kill them. Most of them survived but in very serious condition. Joanna wanted to initially give them all the best healthcare and therapists, and then she wanted to send them to New York where she would put them all on a primetime special to bring them all back together. Joanna is fired because of the whole incident and the members of the EBS board not wanting to wear the controversy. She has a mental breakdown.

Walter, Joanna’s wife… er, husband, who has a different last name, because girl boss wouldn’t take it, visits her on their anniversary and tells her he quit his job at the network as well. They agree to move to Stepford, Connecticut. As they drive into the town and toward their new home, Walter gets one look at Faith Hill’s Sarah Sunderson and realizes he’s moved to a great town. They are met at their new home by Claire Wellington (Glenn Close) who shows them all the bells and whistles of their new home.

This is actually a decent scene. One, all those bells and whistles, like the security system panel that talks to other areas of the house and so on, feel like the types of stuff that would have been called “The Home of the Future!” in the 50s. So it does fit that aesthetic of the male-dominated Stepford, and what we saw in the credits, nicely. You do kind of get an idea that Walter is thinking about his wife’s current state after her breakdown and seems a little sad about it. But the goddamn scene is ruined by something I should like. The house comes with a robotic dog. In one regard, it’s a cute doggo. In another regard, when you think about what goes on in Stepford, it makes sense there are robotic pets here. But then it tries to come down the stairs and tumbles because it’s a dumb robot and the legs and body aren’t properly aligned to walk up or down stairs. Then, how did it get upstairs? Why did it go upstairs? Was this just for a joke?

The next day, Joanna gets the tour of Stepford from Claire. She learns how Stepford is over 200 years old and was founded by George Washington. Stepford is the perfect town. They have no crime, no poverty, and no drug pushing. They drive past the palatial Stepford Men’s Association. Joanna asks where the women go. Claire tells her they go to the Simply Stepford Day Spa.

The women in the day spa is like a Roger Ailes wet dream. They wear dresses and heels while they work out. As Claire says, they should always look their very best no matter what it is they are doing. Besides, what would the men think if they saw their wives wearing dark and dingy, urban workout clothes? That just so happens to be how Joanna is dressed.

As this scene plays out, I hate my life more and more. Claire puts disco music on and they all do the “Washing Machine” maneuver which is just them shaking their hips and making washing machine noises with big smiles on their faces. I’m… I’m embarrassed for everyone in this movie. I really am.

You might think that being a red-blooded American man like I am, you know, one of those real Chads that is full of testosterone and patriotism, that this would give me a hard-on so rigid that it would hurt, but… I don’t. The over-the-top comedy is just bad. It’s bad. It’s trying very hard to be funny and it just isn’t.

That 1975 version of the film had a lot of subtlety. This one has a cannon that is packed full of just everything and trying to blast you in the face with that everything. Being this was nearly 30 years later, you would think that the original subject matter could be adapted slightly better and stick the landings that the original film couldn’t. However, this movie comes off as if it thinks the original movie, and more likely the sequels, were just campy pieces of shit that need to be poked fun of. It’s terribly misguided. I blame the script because it feels like the movie can’t break the idea that satire is comedy so the more comedic it is, the more satirical it should be taken. That’s not always the case.

Nor is it always the case that anything that has any hint of satire can always be reinterpreted as a comedy. The nuance of the 1975 film was that Joanna was slowly discovering the cracks in the facade of Stepford. As the cracks became more and more evident, the explanation of what was going on became more and more insane. Here, we’re just shown that all the women are straight out of the 1950s male gaze and that’s it. There could be an argument made that Joanna’s mental state in this version creates a different interpretation of what she’s seeing, but it doesn’t make any sense that she would be that stupid to see that the people in this town are totally bonkers.

It’s the Fourth of July in Stepford. Joanna and Walter bring the kids, but Joanna says they are only staying ten minutes and getting the hell out of there. Walter, who has made visits to the Men’s Association building, thinks she’s being silly about how closed off Joanna’s been to the others in Stepford. Joanna says that she doesn’t want to be around very long because the women there are insane and will glom onto her quickly. Sure enough, when some of the Stepford women notice they are there, they 1) make very innuendo-heavy compliments toward Walter, and 2) act very weird around Joanna.

Good news, though, Bobbie, played by Bette Midler, is here to inject a little life into the festivities. She wants to know how they could possibly celebrate the nation’s birthday without any Black folks, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and so forth. Bobbie recognizes Joanna and vice versa. Things get real real schticky now. Bobbie’s husband is played by Jon Lovitz and they poke at each other to the point that Joanna tries to shoo away her husband as if she’s going to call security on him and it’s fucking awful. Similarly, we meet Roger and Jerry, the town’s resident gay couple. Because they are gay, of course they know Joanna and Bobbie too. Of course, Joanna and Bobbie know who Roger and Jerry are.

This entire scene plays horribly. None of these characters feel like real people. The way they walk into frame, say, “Hey, aren’t you so and so?”, and then the other person says, “Yes! And you are so and so!” This is bad. Very bad. Again, the script is stilted and unnatural. Then, during the town square dance, Faith Hill flips out and begins spinning quickly and violently and repeating various square dance moves. She collapses and Roger tells Bobbie that Sarah must be drunk. Bobbie responds, “She’s blonde.”

Get it? Guys! Get it? DO YOU FUCKING GET IT?!?

I really hate this movie. I’m not sure what is it that has triggered this kind of reaction in me, but this movie is worse than even I remembered it being when I saw it during my time working at AMC. It is giving me those flashbacks to movies like Saturday the 14th where every joke is so over-written that I cannot believe anyone thought any of these jokes were funny at the computer when being written, at the table read being rehearsed, or on set when being filmed.

Maybe the joke is that anyone who thinks this should be taken seriously as an iconic feminist satire and horror tale 30 years on would be the type of people who would find these jokes funny.

Claire’s husband, Mike, Christopher Walken, shows up at the dance and forces Joanna out of the way to perform a little bit of a noggin adjustment on Sarah. He then orders a couple guys to put her in his Hummer and he’ll take care of the rest. Again, Joanna, while right in the idea that Sarah should not be moved, demands that Mike call an ambulance for her. Again, Joanna is not exactly ingratiating herself to the rest of us. She’s right in some ways here, but instead of building this character as someone we should be siding with always, she’s abrasive and bossy. It doesn’t make me want to feel sorry for her.

In fact, let’s just cut to the end, toss her to the robot factory, and get us a bomb-ass sexy version of her stat!

Actually, Matthew Broderick does a great job of summing up the issues here. Joanna needs to be in charge. Always. After being fired, she still wants to control everything around her. She came to Stepford, where things are different, and cannot accept that someone else, anyone else, let alone a man, runs things. So Walter tells her that she has a personality that makes people want to kill her.

That is the most relatable thing in this whole movie.

Shockingly, Joanna relents. She says that Walter is right about everything. She knows she’s flawed. She does love Walter and she does want to be better for him. Okay, this is humanizing. This makes Joanna something of a person and not a caricature. She can at least understand that she has flaws and she does care about Walter. However, she doesn’t say anything about her kids. They have appeared in exactly two scenes. They are practically non-existent.

This leads to maybe the most interesting thing about this version of the movie. Joanna tries to be better for Walter. Walter doesn’t want her to wear black anymore, so she puts on a pink dress and colorful apron. She tries cleaning up around the house. She tries to walk back her own thoughts on the whole Sarah Sunderson thing and take Mike’s word that she’s fine. She even tries to convince Roger and Bobbie to go visit Sarah. You know, because that’s what people outside of Manhattan do to show they care about someone.

So yeah, there’s a reverse thing going on with Joanna in this version. She’s not exactly resisting the concept that she needs to be more “present” for her family and, more importantly, for Walter. So she’s trying to become a self-made Stepford Wife. There’s something to that.

Joanna, Bobbie, and Roger go to the Sunderson house to check in on Sarah. Similarly to the original when Bobbie and Joanna were going to the various homes looking for women to join their club, they heard Sarah and her husband, Herb, going to town in bed. It’s maybe the most easily repeatable thing from the 1975 movie, but this movie has to take it way too far because of course it does. How does it go too far? Roger wants to go upstairs to also get fucked by Herb.

Anyway, they try to hide but they find a remote control with Sarah’s name on it. Because Roger is basically an immature teenager in a grown man’s body, he wants to play with it. It causes Sarah to freeze. It makes her boobs grow larger. It makes her walk backward. I hate this movie.

We learn why the new people are here in Stepford. Of course, Walter and Joanna are here to have a more relaxing life. Roger and Jerry are here because they’ve been having issues and seeing a couple’s counselor. Apparently, Jerry has become a gay Republican. Bobbie and Dave are here because of a court order. That’s all Bobbie says. Joanna says they should actually try to be happy and try this whole Stepford thing. They are here because they’ve all run into some sort of trouble, so why not try to actually fix it instead of letting it get worse?

This turns out to be harder than it seems. As this trio goes to the Stepford Book Club meeting to find out that the entire town is excited as shit for a picture book that highlights various Christmas-themed keepsakes and homemade items, Walter is hanging out more and more with the other guys at the Men’s Association. He is quite enamored with the town, the camaraderie at the clubhouse, and, of course, their wives are all stunning. It’s clear he’s being seduced by the whole Stepford life.

There is one pretty good series of jokes that happen at the Book Club meeting. Because the book is all about Christmas, a ton of attention is brought to Bobbie because she’s Jewish. This leads to a lot of stuff about how she can make all the normal Christmas stuff into stuff for Hanukkah. Bobbie recommends she take pine cones and build a huge sign that reads “BIG JEW” for her front lawn. Then she suggests she can put a pine cone on her vibrator and have a REALLY Merry Christmas. This is what you get Bette Midler for and that worked. It also worked that Roger is way into the campy holiday-themed stuff at the meeting too. That was funny. See? There’s something here, it’s just an awful end product.

Walter tells the men that Joanna is going to be different since their chat last night. Mike asks he really thinks someone like Joanna is going to change. It’s clear the rest of the town wants to fully initiate Walter into their way of life. Mike reminds one of the men that he owes Walter $20. So something kind of stupid happens.

I’d really like someone to explain why this is anything anyone would want. Like, I get the idea of wanting a hot-ass wife. I get the idea of having sex whenever however you want. I get the idea of total subservience in all ways. But do you really want your wife to be your ATM too? She’s not making the money. She’s only carrying the money. If she was printing money, then hot damn, that sounds like a hell of a deal. I kind of feel like if she’s loaded with cash you run a real chance of smashing your dick up against a hard stack of bills in at least one or two of those holes.

Anyway…

Dave picks Walter up for another meeting. When they leave, Walter is kind of crass about when he’ll be home. Bobbie comes up with the idea that she and Joanna need to spy on the goings on at the Men’s Association. They creep inside and Bobbie really wants to figure out why all the women are stone cold sexpots while all the men are nerdy and unattractive. They go inside and find the hall is adorned with portraits of the men and their wives. Not many have kids in the portraits. They are discovered by Roger who was there with Jerry. The two women escape when the rest of the men come into the hallway. Jerry has Roger go into a specific room in the hallway where he sees something he doesn’t understand how to interpret.

The next day, Roger is not answering the door when Bobbie and Joanna come calling. Jerry tells Bobbie and Joanna to meet him at a big town meeting where it’s unveiled that the latest Republican candidate for State Senate is none other than a very straight and serious looking Roger. Oh how quaint it is to think that Republican voters would accept an openly gay man even in some sort of local election.

Anyway, there’s missing shit here. I get the reason why you cut away from the Men’s Association scene with Roger confused about what he’s seeing. But you go to Roger and Jerry’s house where Bobbie and Joanna are looking for him to insert some jokes about his flamboyant gay shit being in the trash because ha ha ha Ha HA HA HA GUYS HAHAHA! (God, I hate this movie.) But then smash cut to that town square thing where we learn that Jerry has told Joanna and Bobbie to meet there. Why? Why would Jerry want them to meet there? To rub it in the women’s faces that Roger is no longer flaming? What does that do other than create anxiety and suspicion for Bobbie and Joanna?

Do you understand why listening only to test audiences which then causes reshoots to take place is a bad thing?

Rightfully so, Joanna now wants to get the fuck out of Dodge as fast as possible. Roger is obviously different. Something is off in Stepford. Granted, it’s not as obvious to her as it was to the Joanna of the 1975 movie that there is this impending doom bearing down on her, but still… It all feels weird to Joanna and I guess that’s enough. Joanna and Bobbie are planning to leave. She tells Walter that it really is not normal for everything to be so cheery and without problems. She’s going to pick up the kids from camp and leave with them and Walter can come with or not, she doesn’t really care. Walter realizes that Joanna is never going to change as she said she would. Walter does tell her that if she really is that unhappy, they will move back to the city as soon as possible.

Joanna is woken up in the middle of the night by the robot dog whining from the floor. In its mouth is a fancy remote control with Joanna’s name on it. Joanna gets curious and starts looking up each of the women of Stepford online and discovers that each of them used to have high power positions in corporations and government. They’re all now blonde and bubbly bimbos. Even an award-winning dog has gone missing, which makes Joanna think her robot dog is that missing Terrier.

The next morning, Joanna rushes over to Bobbie’s house to tell her what she found to see that Bobbie’s house is immaculately clean and Bobbie’s a completely different person. Joanna tries to explain what the other women in Stepford were, but Bobbie only keeps offering her coffee. Bobbie says she can help Joanna be less selfish and a better person. As she says these things to Joanna, Bobbie’s hand is in the open flame on the stove and this causes Joanna to run away.

As was the case with the 1975 version, Joanna learns her kids are nowhere to be found and she must try to reclaim them before leaving town. This takes her to the Men’s Association where Mike tells her the children are safe. Walter reveals himself to be there with the rest of the men. He explains that she is better than him at everything. And here, finally, we get something that really does feel like it’s the heart of what this movie really could have been if it wasn’t such a bukkake of a misfire.

Walter says that each of the men here in Stepford married an Amazon, a Supergirl, an absolute stunner of a woman who was great at everything she put her mind to. He asks Joanna what did that make them. She says the exact right thing – “Smart, worthy, lucky…” Walter fires back that they all see it differently. He thinks this made them the wuss and, worse, the woman in the relationship. The men of Stepford are tired of this. They are turning the tables and finally feeling like the real men they should feel like.

Joanna asks if their answer to this perceived inadequacy is to kill their wives and replace them with robots. Mike says that’s not what happens at all. They are perfected. He shows a video that explains the process and it’s all done in 50s-style kitschy comedy with him underexplaining how women are changed. According to this video, the women’s brains are all kept intact but with microchips attached to them, and then the bodies are enhanced.

However, that doesn’t really ring true, does it? In fact, it CAN’T ring true. We saw a woman being used as an ATM. We saw Roger see a whole duplicate of himself. How can it be true that their brains are microchipped and their bodies enhanced and they are still the same person? Bette Midler’s fucking hand was on fire! That’s not how it can work. At all.

This is where things really feel like a rewrite. Start with her coming in looking for the kids and being confronted by the men of Stepford. Then, we have this goofy, far more comedic than necessary, video of Christopher Walken explaining how they chip women’s brains and overhaul their bodies. But then Joanna seemingly speaks sense to Walter about whether or not the Stepford Wives can mean it when they tell their husbands they love them. It seems as though Walter is going to help Joanna break free, right? Like, that’s the rewrite of the happy ending the test audience wanted? But still, there’s a whole-ass robotic Nicole Kidman on a slab too. So what is it? Is it enhanced bodies or robot wives?

But I can hear someone out there say, “Oh, but Geoff, this is a comedy! Does it really matter if everything makes sense as long as you get some laughs?” YES! Yes, it really does matter! First of all, as a comedy, this movie sucks. Second, movies need to make sense. You need to understand what things are, what they mean, and how it connects from one part to the next from beginning to end. It matters a great deal.

If Walter is able to be convinced by Joanna that he’s better off with a flawed person compared to a perfect machine that doesn’t feel anything, then, okay, you have a way to end this by having him help fight their way out and you get a message to tag onto this movie. However, Walter and Joanna descend into the basement with the slab that has robotic Joanna on it and we come out the other side with the exact same ending as the 1975 movie – at least for Joanna.

Or so you think.

In the biggest and clearest example of a rewrite in the history of rewrites, there is an additional scene tacked on. At a big party at the Men’s Association, Walter and Joanna are introduced as the cream of the crop of Stepford and given the honor of the best that is Stepford love. Whatever that means. Anyway, Christopher Walken asks Glenn Close to share in a waltz. Everyone begins dancing. Joanna dances with Mike as Walter distracts Claire and goes to the basement.

There, Walter starts tapping a bunch of buttons. It pulls up Faith Hill’s picture on a screen and shows her brain’s microchips. I guess we’re going with the brain chips? He begins this thing called “Nano Reversal”. It causes the chips in her brain to melt/disappear/dissipate? She’s back to normal. Everyone programmed by the Stepford process reverts to who they were before.

If you had questions about what the fuck was going on with this movie, this is not going to help. I guess it was brain chips and nanites that made the women what they were in Stepford? That one girl was a fucking ATM! Are they people? Are they robots?

Well, I know Nicole Kidman is not a robot. How do I know that for sure when nothing else makes any sense? Walter says so. He says she’s not a robot and he couldn’t go through with it. Okaaaaay. I mean, clearly, the rest of the women of Stepford are not robots either because they all know exactly what is going on, and their nanites were erased…?

Oh fuck it.

Mike calls Walter a disgrace and all the other men start yelling and agreeing with him. You know, despite their wives pretty much ready to cut all their balls off in one hell of a Wicker Man-like ceremony. Mike picks up a candlestick to bludgeon Walter with, but Joanna does too and smashes Mike’s head… all the way off.

So… sigh. Fuck. Okay, Mike WAS a robot. Claire was never anything like the other Stepford Wives. Claire was the mastermind of the whole thing. She was a brain surgeon and caught the real Mike in bed with her much younger friend. She was more enamored with the old timey idea of the wife being at home and the husband being the leader, etc. Okay. But this does not do anything to answer the larger question of the movie – WERE THE STEPFORD WIVES ROBOTS OR PEOPLE OR ENHANCED PEOPLE?!? Seriously, even after Mike loses his head, Walter and Joanna still ask Claire if she’s a robot or a person.

I… sigh. This shit is as clear as mud when it comes to this movie’s plot and overall explanation of anything. The women seemed to be robots because, again, I must point to that one girl being an ATM and Bette Midler having her hand on fire. Yet, apparently, it seems they all kept their brains because there are microchips? Then Walter apparently did something that “reversed” the whole process? So I have to land on they were some sort of sorta Borg with nanites and enhancements that could dissolve at a random series of button pushing?

Goddammit.

I really hate this fucking movie. It’s bad enough that it isn’t funny. It’s bad enough that it has nothing to say. It’s bad enough that it has a really messy second half. The worst thing is that it can’t decide where to shit. It can’t take a stand on whether or not the Stepford Wives were killed and replaced by robots or if their brains were put into robot bodies or if they are still who they are and just have microchips and shit in their bodies. Whatever answer you land on, it negates an earlier part of a movie. So I guess it has to be all of those possibilities.

I mean it when I say this, and it definitely should not be taken lightly that I write this sentiment… This is one of the WORST movies I’ve ever covered on this blog. It’s not Pot Zombies bad. But it’s bad. It is most definitely one of the worst big-budget films I’ve ever seen. 20 years ago, when I screened this after building the print of it, I was probably into the idea of seeing these women all dolled up. I knew it was bad, but at least I got 93 minutes of eye candy. In 2023, after seeing the 1975 version, and seeing the Barbie movie which does this whole thing even better than either film version, I can say that this movie suuuuuucks. Bad. It sucks donkey turds. I can’t believe how much this movie bothered me. Seriously, I could probably talk for, I dunno, like four days about how bad this movie is.

The thing is, there is a kernel of something that could be workable in this. The topic was due for a fresh coat of paint when this movie was made. You have a good cast and capable people writing and directing it. The decision to go campy was the first mistake and then the film was not able to carry its own weight of any message or concept or, frankly, anything was the death blow. Maybe this is a movie that some people get together and watch for a bad movie night thing, but, frankly, don’t. There’s not enough here to have fun with. It’s just a giant shit sandwich overflowing out of the hoagie bun that it’s crammed into.

Not even a decapitated robot head of Christopher Walken electrocuting Glenn Close when she kisses it can save this movie.

That’s the end of that. What I need is some sincere schlock. Something that was intended to be the schlock it was and not this ass disaster of celluloid. I think I need to call in Reb Brown to save the day. Come back next week for a long overdue look at 1983’s Yor: The Hunter from the Future! Until then, peace out, motherfuckers!