The mystery and intrigue was definitely there for this film. The likeable cast also made it easy to enjoy the ride. It kind of unfolded towards the end and felt a bit ridiculous but still kind of enjoyed it.
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Kingslaay5 January 2022
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jodiverse23 May 2003There is nothing mysterious or intriguing about this movie at all. The only mystery is why anyone watching this thing for longer than five minutes wouldn't be able to figure out what happens in the next hour and a half.
Jenny, a divorced mother of two meets Erich, a handsome artist, in an art gallery. Of course he's as charming as he is handsome and seemingly perfect. After dating for maybe a month, he presses her to marry him, and even though she is hesitant she agrees. Everyone moves up to his gorgeous house in Quebec, and then the new husband's charm is displaced by increasingly bizarre behavior.
*** SPOILERS FOLLOW, SO YOU MAY WANT TO STOP READING HERE!!! ***
Erich (the artist/husband), it turns out, witnessed his mother's death by drowning/electrocution as a 10-year-old boy. Ever since then, he has kept the big house in a state of sort of suspended animation, a shrine to his dead mother. He won't let one of his new daughters (he adopts his bride's kids) touch anything in his old boyhood bedroom, and when his wife rearranges the sitting room furniture, he throws a fit and puts everything back the way it has been for about 30 years.
Erich spends way too much time in a secret studio on his property, and it just so happens that those nights when he is at work there, we see, through hair covering a mysterious person's face, that mysterious person looking in on Jenny as she sleeps. (We also hear some particularly overdone heavy breathing, which I suppose is meant to heighten the drama.) We never know who it is, of course. But of course we know who it is. Or we do if we've watched this movie with half an eye open.
Eventually a puppy is shot, Jenny's ex-husband is drowned, a farm hand is attacked by a horse who is fed drugged oats, Jenny and Erich's newborn baby is smothered to death, and of course everything conspires to pin the blame on Jenny. But we are still wondering, Gee, whodunnit, even as we see Erich's face struggling to retain composure over Jenny's shoulder as he consoles her and assures her he knows she is innocent.
To make an already too long story short, we eventually find out (as if we didn't already know) that Erich is a bona fide wacko who's been dressing up in his dead mother's green cape and dark wig and HURTING and KILLING people, and passing off her bad artwork as his own. (Perhaps one of the funniest scenes in this entire movie involves Jenny finding all of Erich's outrageously laughable and horrible paintings and running across the lawn with one in tow.) And all of these paintings answer all of the questions everyone's been asking.
Erich, in the meantime, has kidnapped the kids, has called Jenny to try to force her to sign a letter swearing she killed her ex-husband and poisoning the horse, and she has the police and Erich's best friend (whom Erich accuses her of being in love with) at the house. They all leave, and then Jenny takes matters into her own hands. Puts on a green shawl/cape, beckons to Erich (who has returned to the property), and then he chases her to the very barn where he'd killed his mother several decades earlier. He's just about to kill Jenny when the farm hand (whose daughter, by the way, he'd also killed years ago) shoots him neatly through the back.
And then Jenny and Mark find the girls where Erich, in his last breath, said they would be, and the foursome literally walks off into a sunset.
Oh, and the performances? Every one of them stock and cliché.
It took me about ten minutes to write this thing. Twice as long as it took me to "get" what was going to happen in this movie. I hope I saved anyone from wasting any time on it at all. -
v-1497228 May 2019Have you ever seen psycho ,or Gaslight. Well if you have then you just watched this movie! Only the acting in both of those movies were good. Although i do think Carol Higgins Clark did an ok job, everyone els well.... lets just say that i have seen better acting in an ABC after-school Special!
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Weirdling_Wolf30 October 2022The deliciously diverting, compellingly edge-of-seat Mary Higgins Clark psychodrama, 'A Cry in The Night' has an engaging plot, credible performances, with the picturesque locale providing a suitably isolated backdrop for this memorably macabre emotional meltdown. This competently written thriller also has a tantalizingly tweaked William Castle quality, adding a pleasing eccentricity to Mary Higgins Clark's turbulent tale of diabolical duplicity, and the dashingly handsome, immaculately coiffed Perry King is a sheer delight as the initially suave, seemingly family orientated Erich Krueger, whose increasingly toxic jealousies torments his wife Jenny (Carol Higgins Clark) to breaking point! Occasionally camp, yet divinely melodramatic, this lively, rewardingly creepy, conspicuously Canadian TV movie concludes in a wickedly warped climax that has far more to offer psychotronic fans than you might initially think possible! My main interest in the undeniably spry 90s thriller, 'A Cry in The Night' was Perry King's intense, masterfully menacing persona, plus the film's strident theatricality!
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calgarth20 February 2013A Cry in the Night is the best of the Mary Higgins Clark novels and the best of the movies. Although the movie would have been better if it had followed the book more closely, it was still good. For example, in the book, Erich was slim and only a couple inches taller than Jenny, which made his donning a wig and wearing her coat or his mother's cloak and being mistaken for them much more plausible. Perry King was MUCH too tall and large for the part and I can't imagine anyone mistaking him for a woman and I doubt he would have been able to fit into Jenny's coat.
Believe it or not, this movie actually shows someone shooting a dog -- something that would NEVER be included today now that so many people in the US and Canada have turned into dog freaks. In the movie, Erich shoots one of his employee's dogs because Jenny's two kids were running after it and he claimed he thought it was a rabid stray, citing the fact a local child had died after being bitten by a stray dog. The veterinarian, who was there checking the horses, said he would have done the same thing.
Another reason I liked this novel and movie adaptation is because it wasn't set in New York City, with the exception of the very beginning. Not everyone is from New York and I could never understand why Clark set so many of her novels exclusively in the city and so many of her heroines were heiresses, psychologists, etc., or her favorite -- a district attorney. -
Ice200222 May 1999A Cry in the Night is a great movie to watch!! It's a lot like the book that Mary Higgins Clark wrote, but I like the movie just as well or better!!!
This movie is about a divorced single mother who works in an art gallery. She meets an artist, falls in love, and gets married to him. After she moves to his house in the country, strange things start happening to her and the kids. What happens?? You'll just have to watch and see!
It's rated PG-13 for violence and maybe a little language. Hope this helps people! Bye! -
Murrayjohn21 September 2002A Cry In The Night is a solid adaptation of Mary Higgins Clark's bestseller. Robin Spry does a good job with the screenplay and direction.Carol Higgins Clark(M.H.'s daughter!) is very good as Jenny and so is Annie Girardot as Reine.The best though,is Perry King with his thoroughly chilling performance as the increasingly deranged Erich in this suspense tour-de-force. 8 out of 10.