You know the movie type: The __From Hell. This is another addition to the genre. So...this is what America is going to the movies for today?

Picture this.
There I am, all alone in a dark, empty theatre before the movie The Glass House begins. I don’t know where to sit. My biker sweetie is getting a drink for himself and ice for me, but it isn’t exactly America Goes To The Movies in Lincoln, Nebraska, is it? What a disappointment. Of course, what do you expect for the last showing on a Tuesday night, but I had hoped more night owls like us would help the theatres send money to the relief effort.

Suddenly the screen lights up and music slams against the walls. It’s only previews, but I stumble into a chair and allow the bombardment into my brain. Soon my friend shows up and I take my ice. One mouthful is all I manage before the movie begins with its eerie music score by Christopher Knight (I think) and cool blue cinematography by Alar Kavilo. Then images of horror afflict me as the film begins with girlfriends watching a teenager slasher movie. All but one girl screams at it, who is played by a 16-year-old version of Helen Hunt, talented Leelee Sobieski.

In the next scene we meet her younger brother, played adequately by Trevor Morgan (Jurassic Park III). Family life with Mom, presented by Rita Wilson, and Dad, courtesy of Michael O’Keefe, is then shown in all of its innocent contentment, but I just know that won’t last. I am right. Soon the parents are killed in a car crash and the kids go to live with their parents’ best friends, Terry and Erin Glass, as portrayed sinisterly by Stellan Skarsgard and rather hysterically by Diane Lane.

The Glasses’ house lies off the Pacific up on rocks far from neighbors like a 21st-century remake of Frankenstein’s castle in Malibu, California. Built entirely of glass, marble and chrome, on the floors as well, it makes me wonder what kind of house they would have had if their name had been Mudd or Styx. I know this movie has been compared to Hansel and Gretel being trapped in the gingerbread house because the Glasses shower the kids with expensive goodies while plotting their demise (after finding out they’re worth four mil), but I prefer to think of it as a twisted update of Disney’s The Parent Trap. Instead of the kids trying to reunite their divorced parents, the legal guardians, from now on called step parents for convenience, try to stay alive by killing the kids for the money to pay off the husband’s loan sharks..and with drugs in the wife’s case.

Comments

My sweetie and I may have taken advantage of being alone in the dark once or twice, especially during the lovingly-filmed swim by Sobieski and her subsequent running around screaming in her bikini as her psycho stepfather chases her, when I felt overdressed and my biker was rapt with probably more than a protective feeling towards the damsel in distress. I thought she was certainly losing her cool all of a sudden and could’ve called the police instead. Throughout the movie we see her picking up obvious clues that the Glasses are bad people, but the writer Wesley Strick didn’t want it to just be a mystery. It had to be a real teenage THRILLER with the requisite sex abuse, screaming, chasing and horror.

There was a coldness about the entire, wacky movie that made me cuddle closer to my sweetie, starting the moment the kids came to the castle on the rocks to the blank stares they gave each other to the predictably bloody ending. Skarsgard’s prowling stepfather was the most believable character for me and Sobieski’s sleuth/screamer was okay in the beginning, but both characters and the others, like Lane’s stepmother/drug addict, became increasingly annoying or laughable for their stupidity and repetitious dialogue.

I compared notes with my 24-year-old biker who, you must realize, even enjoyed Travolta’s Battlefield Earth, and he loved it. Even the silly ending you’ve seen dozens of times before. I guess he could wonder about the questions of why the stepfather was in debt suddenly, where the kids’ trust attorney, intelligently played by Bruce Dern, came from, and what happened to the Glasses’ own kid and still think it was gripping fun.

But would he watch it again? Only if nothing else was on TV, hehe. I know I won’t be watching it again. All these actors have been in much better movies than this recycled thriller for the teenage crowd. It was directed by Daniel Sackheim in his debut, but it’s nothing like the grammy-winning TV shows he’s directed (NYPD Blue for one).

I suggest the original Frankenstein if you want horror or The (Original) Parent Trap for comedy, but I wouldn’t mix the two as this almost two-hour movie did. I reviewed both if that helps. It becomes more obvious to me that the older films were made with the discerning adult in mind, but today’s films too frequently are not. America may be going to the movies on the weekends these days, but not, I fear seeing as much quality.

This is an entry in the "America Goes To The Movies
(AGTTM) Write-off", where Epinions members go see a
movie on Tuesday, September 25 to support the American
Red Cross and the United Way. For a list of participants,
please visit the following website:
http://www.txreviews.com/AGTTM/index.html
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Recommended: No