Do you ever watch a film that's actually quite close to being good, but just can't quite stick the landing when it needs to? 'Killer in Law' is no classic. The plot of a relative who starts out as merely overbearing, but ends up with more sinister motives is nothing new, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be bad. It depends on the execution. Here, a grandmother joins her son and his wife and daughter after an extended period, er, 'in an institution' shall we say? Of course they welcome her at first, but soon things take a darker turn.
And in this outing, some of the actors are actually quite good. The leading lady is very watchable and can easily handle the role. Plus the little girl who plays the daughter is decent enough for her age. Sometimes when youngsters are placed centre stage they're either bad actors or simply annoying. Here, she's neither. However, whereas they're good the husband seems to be more like a male model who's trying his hand at acting and the older lady who plays the grandmother uses every ham-fisted overacting technique ever. Although, perhaps I shouldn't rag on the cast too much. The script doesn't give them much to work with and the people behind the camera could probably have tweaked the script to higher standards.
During the opening there's so much exposition they might as well have just done one long 'text crawl;' in fact people almost SPEAK in exposition to tell the audience the general set-up for what's to come. The strange thing about the script is that most of it actually works. It's like every ten lines of dialogue a child was allowed to add one line before handing writing duties back to the grown-ups. This gives the dialogue a really uneven feel to it.
When it comes to the story, there's nothing you won't really see coming. Anyone not a major member of the cast is effectively there for a 'bodycount' (which isn't very high - and don't expect any major gore or ingenious kills or make-up effects). What you have here is a very bog-standard affair that would have felt outdated back in the eighties.
