Sara Watches Stuff

Imagine an alternate universe where I watch mostly good movies. This review is not from that universe. The Glass House  was a commercial flop and while it’s mostly blamed on the fact that it came out days after 9/11, it probably wouldn’t have fared better at any other time because it’s just generally not a great movie.  It’s about a girl whose parents die, putting her together with her brother in the care of family friends and sending them to Miami where (of course) things start to get weird with their new guardians. The problems with this movie mostly stem from the heavy reliance on cliche. When I say that, I mean that literally every aspect of this movie’s plot and dialogue and even framing is steeped in cliche. Every time something happens, you can clearly see what is going to follow: what people will respond, what actions will take place, what drama will occur. It is not necessarily bad, it just doesn’t really have anything interesting going for it. There's not any in...

Stylized appallingly as Thir13en Ghosts , I’d only ever heard bad things about this remake of the 1960 film (I haven’t seen that one, for what it’s worth). I went into it knowing next to nothing, other than the presence of Tony Shaloub and Matthew Lilliard - Monk and Shaggy, basically.  It’s got a pretty standard starter plot, where a grieving family inherit a house and find out that, ooooh, it’s haunted. Thankfully there’s more to it than that - the ghosts have interesting stories implied and the house itself is more of a machine than anything. Lilliard gives a typically elastic performance, and it’s loads of fun. Oh Matthew Lilliard, you distinctive, distinctively mannered man. The whole movie is actually pretty self aware and self effacing, with a great balance of darkness and light.  I’m always going to go easier on a movie that has a whole section of dialogue about hunting ghosts, to which someone else responds “goats?”. I loved the cheesy gore effects like you ...