Killer in Law

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 What you have here is a very bog-standard affair that would have felt outdated back in the eighties.

Diabolical acting, Ridiculous plot. Absolutely terrible film .

I feel people who gave an extremely low rating and bad - or even nasty - critics were much too harsh.

The actors are good. The little family is engaging and Granny is deeply troubled and scary. Yes, the course of action is predictable, but it it unrolls the eay it should and the little girl is totally natural and REALLY good.

Grandma is beautiful, believable as creepy crazy woman in total denial of her irresponsability causing her daughter's death.

All the kids are good and believable, as well as the protagonist's friends. I must day that if I had relied on the bad ratings and skipped watching that movie, I would have missed a good time.

This is a movie to watch on a day when you want to relax and not rack your brains to follow a complicated plot with lots of twists and turns and intricate plot.

Perfect Friday night end-of-the-week movie to watch eating Cheetos with cola while vedging on the couch!👍

Okay, this movie is bad - real bad. But the ironic thing is that the actress who plays the visiting Grandma is actually named Nana Visitor.

Besides that, this is typical LMN pablum that is predictable and mundane.

It wasn't that bad of a movie. but there were a couple of plot moments that obviously didn't make sense. It funny at the end how both the mother and mother-in-law seem to have been trained by the green beret. Glad to see they have moved on to different type killers now. Stalkers, nannies, ex girlfriends, ex boyfriends, and so on were becoming too cliche. I would like to see them get away from the family setting and try something different. IE murder mystery at a magic club or a carnival.