The idea of turning Brooks Stanwood's wonderful novel The Glow into a film has been kicking around Hollywood for almost a quarter-century; the first paperback releases of the book had "Soon to be a major motion picture!" on them. As usual, that didn't pan out...until 2002.

Would that we had waited another quarter century rather than get a Lifetime Original Movie™. Not only that, but a Lifetime Original Movie directed by Craig Baxley, whose feature film record was so bad it's a miracle anyone lets him work in Hollywood at all.

Baxley (director of such brilliant cinematic fare as "I" Come in Peace, Stone Cold, and Deep Red-and fear, my brothers and sisters, for he has been put in charge of the remake of The Kingdom) takes a script by Stanwood and equally good teleplay artist Gary Sherman (Dead and Buried, Vice Squad) and comes up with, well, bupkus. Jackie (Portia de Rossi) and Matt (Dean Cain) Lawrence are typical struggling-to-get-by New Yorkers. Matt, on his morning run, is mugged in Central Park, and a trio of septuagenarians comes to his rescue. By the end of the day, they've offered him a cheap apartment on the Upper East Side. The couple move in, and all goes well. Or so they think; Jackie starts becoming suspicious that things are not all as they seem.

The cast, to give credit where credit is due, do the best they can with what they've got. Others on the docket include Hal Linden, Dina Merrill, Grace Zabriskie, Sabrina Grdevich (whose face may not look familiar, but Sailor Moon fans know her as the voice of Sailor Pluto), and a host of others. All of them work relatively well within the parameters of what they've got, which is zilch. Baxley misses hundreds of small details which could have been used to build suspense, sets up silly situations (hiding under the stairs only works when the people you're hiding from can't see under the stairs!), things like that. All of them add up to, well, your typical Lifetime Original Movie; slapped together without any thought to the details of filmmaking.

Brooks Stanwood (actually, a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team, both of whom work in the publishing industry) is still alive, and still producing. With any luck, the authors have been shielded from seeing what their work hath wrought. Were there any justice in the world, the rest of us would have been shielded from it as well. *