Main cast: Leelee Sobieski (Ruby Baker), Diane Lane (Dr Erin Madre-Glass), Stellan Skarsgård (Terrence Glass), Trevor Morgan (Rhett Clark Baker), Bruce Dern (Alvin Begleiter), and Kathy Baker (Nancy Ryan)
Director: Daniel Sackheim

This movie is like just like having to go when there is no toilet around. You build up everything inside, panting as you dash towards the nearest place with a toilet, so close, so close, then… oops.

The Glass House mounts up the suspense, and I am riveted… until the director and scriptwriter both lose it and shot their wad in a series of ridiculous action-packed, subtlety-free sequences. Come to think of it, the whole plot doesn’t make much sense.

Leelee Sobieski just looks bored playing Ruby Baker. Ruby and her brother Rhett are taken in by family friend Terry Glass and his wife Erin after their parents died in a car accident. They are whisked off to the couple’s luxurious glass-paned house in Malibu, and all seems well, until Terry makes a pass at Ruby and things start to hint that maybe the Glasses deliberately murdered her parents just to get their hands on the kids’ inheritance.

Hmm, won’t embezzling funds from the company an easier way to get money to pay off thugs?

Of course, the adults in this movie are morons. Nobody believes Ruby, and Ruby ends up playing superhero. Who wants to bet that there will be a scene where Dr Erin, Evil Mommy, ties Ruby up and jabs that young lady with a syringe filled with sedatives? Oops.

The actors play a decent job here, although I wish Ms Sobieski have shown some emotion other than Xena-esque righteousness and the movie had upped the creep factor by making Terry a more sexually threatening character. As it is, The Glass House is an average thriller more suited to straight-to-video that gets more and more unraveled as it descends into inane silliness towards the end.