Casting George Wendt as a friendly neighborhood serial killer was an easy choice, yet he fits into the role surprisingly well in Masters of Horror: Family. This movie to a slight degree feeds into the notion that you never quite know your neighbors as well as you think you do, although the classic paranoid notion of fearing people you know as well as people you don't know is old as suburbia itself. The similar houses, the mailboxes that never change, driveways all looking alike. That freaky conformity in a way enables a man such as Wendt's charming man with a dark secret to hide in plan site amongst the sane and normal people of an urban setting.
How this movie plays out I cannot reveal, yet its ending is perhaps more fascinating and worthy of discussion than the rest of the movie itself. Luckily this only lasted an hour, as the material would be stretched thin in a longer movie, although the level of victims would have been much higher. I could foresee a 90 minute picture where Wendt not only gathers his regular "family," but then proceeds to kill numerous others to give himself an entire clan. Maybe that would be amusing, yet I'm glad that Masters of Horror enabled John Landis to keep it short and sweet. 80
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