The Cry

Oh dear. An hour and a bit of my life that I'll never get back, lost to The Cry, an immensely poor outing detailing the curse of La Lloreda, a 500-year-old vengeful spirit from Mexico that compels otherwise ordinary, loving mothers to drown their kids - in Central Park, for some reason. Throw in a mystical clairvoyant (think Sid James dressed up as an end-of-the-pier fortune teller), a disturbed mother prone to sketching victims while in an entranced stupor, and two bumbling detectives who would struggle to get into the Keystone Cops, and you start to get the idea. To say that the story is weak, the acting amateurish and the cinematography childish would be to understate the paucity of talent at play in this production. In fact, the film is so bad, that at one point I became convinced that I was mistaken and, in reality, was watching a work of total genius. But alas, no. That reverie ended as soon as it had begun, and the film denied me even the cheapest of "so bad it's good" thrills. A dissection of individual performances would bore you, but suffice to say you may not hear much more from these actors. And as for La Lloreda, I'm afraid the poor dame needs to work a little harder at keeping viewers awake if she has any realistic aspirations of striking terror into people's hearts.