Matt Smitty This movie is like a decent lifetime movie. It isn't really horror, more like a hitchcock style of horror or mystery. A woman and man basically move to a town and at the end of the movie discover that all of the wives have been turned into robots. Thats literally all there is to the storyline, a very basic and simple storyline. The movie is also fairly simple but what carries it along is the dialogue, it is feminine and has an ASMR quality.. Not a bad movie.

Leofwine_draca British director Bryan Forbes is the man behind this subtle sci-fi chiller that's widely regarded as a classic – and for good reason. Based on the book by Ira Levin, this is very close in look and feel to Levin's other famous novel-turned-movie ROSEMARY'S BABY. It's a film that focuses on realism throughout, with slow-burning subtlety the key, and those expecting WESTWORLD-style robot chills will be sorely disappointed. Indeed, the sci-fi elements in this movie are so underplayed as to be almost unnoticeable, albeit in a couple of highly effective scare scenes.Speaking of scares, this isn't exactly what you'd call a frightening film. The chills have been diluted over the course of time, and the dodgy wardrobes hardly make the characters feel identifiable; that's perhaps the reason that they did a remake with Nicole Kidman. Still, a literate script goes a long way in making this effective and slightly disturbing at the same time and the satirical aspect of the proceedings is very well done. Gender roles are treated with the same level of sophisticated wit as we found in George Romero's take on consumerism in DAWN OF THE DEAD. The cast is generally effective, especially the actresses playing the titular wives; in fact they're better than their human counterparts. Katharine Ross I found to be quite irritating for the most part, although she gets better as the film progresses, displaying fear rather than histrionics. Paula Prentiss is intensely annoying as her bubbly, zany friend but once the 'change' happens she's actually very good, making you laugh at the same time a chill runs down your spine.The film is slightly overlong and the slow-moving scenes of the first part may put some viewers off, but by the time we reach the climax, this reaches the heights of similar alienation horror as the more explicitly themed INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS from 1978 and THE THING from 1981. Inevitably, lesser sequels followed.

inspectors71 The first time I saw The Stepford Wives, it was on ABC, in, I think, the fall of 1975. Since then, I've seen TSW about a half dozen times, and I still am amazed at how unsettling this sci-fi/feminist Gothic can be. I don't think of myself as a feminist--the levels of anger and hostility are a turn-off--but I got the point of the movie. Stepford is a grown-ups' movie because it has the audacity to tell an uncomfortable story, one of possessiveness and mass-murder in a sleepy New England community. The futuristic technology in the movie was dated for a long while, but with the advent of that Scarlett Johansson robot in the news, the end scene in TSW seems eerily prescient. In my childhood, I expected the good guys--or in this case, the heroine--to win. I won't give anything away, but the ending of The Stepford Wives is easy to see coming as an almost senior-citizen, but as a high school senior, I was stunned at how the story ends.Some years ago I read the Ira Levin novel. There is a moment in the book that, if I had been a 17 year old, I would have found incomprehensible. The main character and her husband are drifting away from each other, and, one night, the husband starts masturbating in bed while his wife, who he thinks is asleep, is very much awake. She lays still with her back to him. He is crying while he's manipulating himself, and she's horrified but silent.Here is his wife, 6 inches away from him, but the distance could easily be 6 miles. They're no longer married. She's dead to him. Heavy stuff, dude.Johanna Eberhart's husband, Walter, holds a secret so monstrous, his wife's horror at his self-gratification would quickly vanish if she knew her fate.So, when I sat down to watch the movie again some 10 years ago, I was startled at how deeply disturbing the book was and how the movie almost gets it right. The cast is both acceptable and believable, and my only quibble is that, as things wrap up, The Stepford Wives starts to veer dangerously close to a clichéd mad slasher flick. And that's my only complaint. My favorite moment in the movie is when one of Katherine Ross' friends, I think it was Tina Louise, mocks suburban wifey-wifeness by sneering through cigarette smoke, "Personally, I'd rather not squeeze the goddamned Charmin." That line is my take-away from this well-made, unpleasant, and disturbing little horror flick.

parausted The film charged, indirectly, to the invasion of technology and chemicals to be creating new -adaptables- human beings. This was thought in 1975. Today -2015- the discussion is virtually closed : the technological dictatorship and large laboratories already have created a new customizable humanity. Not only that discussion is closed: also the "liberating weapon" -embodied in the film by the intervention of a psychoanalyst- is prohibited (no university in the world has courses on Freudian psychoanalysis). Unfortunately, the film ends poorly, avoiding giving these ideas to the public.I wonder if the director Bryan Forbes or the film's producers were afraid to express these ideas clearly. Anyway this is the best version of the three that have been made (not even worth mentioning "The Stepford Children" ... a horrific stupidity).