Welcome to the second rant review about horrible movies of the "Painful to Watch" series by an even more frustrated Robb P. Lestinci. After a terrible sword and sorcery italian movie where both swords and sorceries were ridicolously bad, it's time to dive into somehow of a cult internet movie, "Cry Baby Lane". Would it be any good? Not to spoil anything, but if it's here, it isn't.
"My mum was right about you! You are pathetic!"
- That weird hobbit kid
Watching this movie felt like watching a far too long and edgy episode of "Goosebumps" with some very confused ideas about where it was heading torwards. "Cry Baby Lane" is a teen horror movie directed by Peter Laurer, a mostly unknown television director, that first aired during the 2000 Halloween season on Nickelodeon. It never got a home video release nor it was dubbed in any other language. Actually, the movie got lost for many years and you may think that's strange, maybe spooky if you want, but, to be honest, even the true story behind this movie, when discovered, is lacklusting.
The movie starts with a narration by one of the few likeable characters in the entire film, the caretaker Mr. Bennett (Frank Langella, ironically also the only good actor involved with the project and believe me, he's good, it's kinda sad to see him here), telling two brothers, the WWE enthusiast Carl (Trey Rogers) and his coward, annoying younger brother Andrew (Jase Blankfort), the story of two conjoined twins and how the ghost of the evil one buried in the middle of the road, still haunts the place called "Cry Baby Lane".
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| I can't even remember a single name of one of these girls |
We then meet their mother, a Breaking Bad's Skyler type of character that's impossible nof to hate, and then, with anonymous directing and wacky editing, we get to the scene where the two brothers finally evoke the evil spirit with some girls that were never introduced properly nor get a real role in the action. But that's fine, after all we never get to understand who most of the characters we meet are, and yet the movie expects us to care about them and somehow recognize them.
After that the plot goes on showing us how nearly the whole city got possesed by this evil spirit because of unknown reasons, there're some worms shots because they are gross, so scary, some more scenes where it's really hard to get what's going on or why some stuff happens, a naked kid running for far too long and yeah, campy dialogues and escamotages to make the story progress, somehow. The lore doesn't make sense, the ghosts neither, the ending is confusing and very badly written and the whole script is a hell of a mess.
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| Andrew and his comically useless sidekick Kenneth |
Except for Andrew, our hero, his brother, the caretaker and the hateable mother, the only characters that deserve a mention are Kenneth (Larc Spies), the caretaker's nephew and assistant, comic relief of the movie and the unlikely deuteragonist of the second act of the movie who really just wants to smoke as much weed as possible while getting practice to say "I'm sorry about your loss" in the best way possible, and that weird hobbit kid that want a 12 years old boy to date his mother implying she'd be fine with that. Yeah. That's something, for sure. At least that little fella keeps quoting Lord of the Rings without any context switching between characters without any real sense giving back the vibes that whoever wrote him never really read the books, but just knew they were popular enough.
The soundtrack is something you'd hear in your typical 90s television horror flick and the cinematography is just bland. Really, nothing special about it. It doesn't even have the same appeal as those from series such as "Tales from the Crypt" or "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" with those unnatural lights and deep blue sky. It was simply anonymous, just like most of the technical sides of this movie. The ghost design in particular is sad to say the least and, even if he appears only for like 10 seconds or so during the end, they didn't even try to make something special about him. He's pale and has strange fingers. Woah. Such a scary freaky monster.
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| The cheap ghost |
The only reason why I decided to keep watching this movie is because of his history: the movie, as said before, has been a piece of lost media for many years. It was never aired on Nickelodeon since its premiere in the 2000 during SNICK's Halloween special. For quite some time it was speculated that it was lost because children got too scared of it (unlikely if you ask me, they would be used to see more creepy stuff) and so it was pulled out from the channel. The legend of a teen horror movie so scary it got censored and never aired again is compelling on its own and helps building up quite some expectations for a movie that was thought to, most likely, never surface again.
A copy, however, was subsequently found and released online by a Reddit user and, due to people's reactions to it, TeenNick re-aired the movie in 2011 and a channel rapresentative confirmed it was never banned because of controversy or something, it was just forgotten. And I don't have a hard time believing it: this movie is probably one of the most forgettable cinematography experiences I've ever witnessed.
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| Spooky possesed eyes |
It's not so bad that it becomes funny or infuriating, it's just mildly bad and that's worse. It means it's a boring, souless and anonymous experience that will vanish from your memories just like the movie did for quite some years.
PAINFUL REVIEW BY
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