When Angie Harmon was Angie Harming!

Two orphaned kids are adopted by a couple who seem nice at first but, once they get home, things almost instantly sour in 2006's Glass House: The Good Mother. It's the direct to video spin-off of Glass House, a movie critics and audiences hated. The Good Mother hasn't exactly garnered a better reputation so the brand tie-in is a little puzzling, as is the very fact of its existence. It is badly written and the performances are average at best but director Steve Antin makes some interesting choices.

Angie Harmon and Joel Gretsch play Eve and Raymond Goode, respectively. They seem like nice people who've just lost their son. Jordan Hinson and Bobby Coleman play Abby and Ethan Snow, the two kids they adopt at the beginning of the film. Abby is the point of view character and it's through her we slowly gather clues about the Goodes' dark secrets.

The director tries to convey feelings with experimental camera work like sudden closeups in the middle of a suspense scene. Sometimes it's effective but there's a strange abundance of closeups on Jordan Hinson, the teenage girl. She is very pretty but she's the point of view character so we need to see what she's looking at. The director seems to forget. There's a moment where she escapes the house and she's looking around, panicked, and we never get a shot to let us know what she's seeing. The camera stays in closeup which is a bit claustrophobic. It's almost like Detour, like this whole scenario is a dream of some kind whose true purpose is to contemplate Jordan Hinson's face.

This impression is heightened by the dialogue. This is what Roger Ebert used to call an "idiot plot," a plot that depends on people not saying or asking things most people naturally would in such a situation. The kids don't ask why the doors to the sprawling Goode manor have locks on the inside. Eve won't explain why she won't let the kids leave the house. The topic of school is never broached. Abby, stuck in the house, never asks to call her friends nor is there mention of her having friends. Instead we watch her play solitaire with a deck of cards like this movie is set in 1910 on a remote farm during a drought. I guess you could see the house as a brain and the battle of wills between Eve and Abby as a war between two aspects of a personality, maybe anxiety and a longing for personal freedom.

Jason London has a small role in the film as a friendly cop. The movie also has one of the most literal appearances of Chekhov's gun I've ever seen.