Cry for the Strangers (1982)

Psychiatrist Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) and his wife Elaine (Cindy Pickett) are moving away from the city to a supposedly quiet little coastal town. As luck will have it, it’s the same place where the family of one of Brad’s child patients has moved to. Little Robbie (Shawn Carson) apparently suffered from an incurable case of ADHD (or something, it’s probably better not to think about it). Yet somehow, something about the place seems to have cured him and turned him “normal” (ugh).

Well, as normal as sneaking out each and every stormy night and watching some “Indian” (I’d use the more correct term “Native American” here, if these weren’t very much bad movie “Indians”) ghosts doing their sacrificial dance gets. Despite the local Sheriff (Brian Keith) mostly pretending everything’s great, there’s something else wrong with the place too. There is a history of strangers dying or getting killed on stormy nights, and it’s pretty clear the death toll is a bit too heavy to be explained by happenstance.

Brad and Elaine kinda-sorta start looking into things on their own, finding dark secrets on their way to a pretty bizarre truth.

As it is based on a John Saul novel, one should not go into this TV horror movie expecting a terribly sensible backstory or much of a plot, though I have to admit the final reveal as it is presented here is perfectly hysterical in all meanings of that word. That’s of course worth quite a bit in my sad little life.

Plus, while the narrative isn’t more than a series of clichés too well-worn for most mainstream horror writers even in 1982, the film was directed by the sometimes great, sometimes terrible Peter Medak. And in his good months, that man really knew how to create a proper macabre mood. He is, after all the director of one of the best ghost stories ever made for the big screen, The Changeling (a film I’ve apparently, scandalously, never written about). This one obviously isn’t on the level of that masterpiece – turns out Patrick Duffy is no George C. Scott – but it is an often striking and always entertaining effort.

Medak makes excellent use of location shots and the coastal setting, using all kinds of camera and direction tricks to turn the place properly creepy, generally working around the problems of plot logic and coherence by slathering on a thick mood of the American Gothic, enhancing the small town shenanigans and (mildly) dark secrets of the place with rather a lot of bad weather. Thanks to Medak’s experience working on lower budgets, the film usually gets around letting its TV budget seams show to often or too heavily. There is, however a certain shot of storm clouds that’s going to repeat again and again when you are watching this. The first two or three times, it’s actually a nice and moody enough shot, emphasising the importance of the weather to the shenanigans on the beach, but after the tenth or so time, it mostly begs the question why CBS had only footage of one single stormy sky in its archives.

For many, Cry for the Strangers’ other big weakness is going to be the final reveal of what’s really going on (or is it?), and the way it expresses its pretty damn silly idea in the most scenery-chewing way imaginable, ending a film that was up to that point holding its own rather well as a silly yet seriously made movie on a note of rather exalted crapness and camp, something that isn’t helped at all by the wild and absurd performance of a certain veteran actor which looks like an attempt to get hired by John Waters. It’s certainly not going to help with anyone ever taking this one seriously, but it’s also the sort of glorious “what the heck were they thinking” moment that makes a film very memorable indeed. If probably not for the reasons filmmakers want you to remember their work, but then, what the heck were they thinking?