Cry Wilderness

This movie appears in my nightmares. I wish so badly to go back to the time when I never saw this, but unfortunately I'm stuck with knowing it exists. It made me ask many questions: Who greenlit this monstrosity? What were they high on? Did they owe a favor to someone? Letting this dumpster fire become an actual movie should have resulted in criminal punishment. Jail time at the very least.

A Bigfoot-type creature befriends Paul, a young student. His father is a park ranger trying to capture an escaped tiger. Everyone in town is on edge and wants the tiger killed. David tries to keep Bigfoot a secret.

Maybe 3 is a little high to rate this film, but I don't feel right giving it a 1 or 2. Unlike some truly awful messes, it never suffers from the biggest sin a movie can make: boredom. The nonsense of the plot and background actually sort of helps. Coherent? No. But all the more entertaining.

What was most interesting to find out is that a couple of the actors involved have actually appeared in real, very successful films. How they were tricked into this (beyond the easy paycheck) is really beyond me.

Cry Wilderness (1987)

* (out of 4)

Paul (Eric Foster) is a young student who runs away from his school after Bigfoot tells him that his forest ranger father is in trouble. You see, the previous summer Paul and Bigfoot became friends but no one believes the kid. Now the kid is reunited with his father who is tracking down a dangerous tiger but there are bigger issues going on.

CRY WILDERNESS is a pretty darn bad movie but it's thankfully campy and silly enough to where you can get some entertainment out of it. The film comes from director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen whose only other credit was a segment he did for the even more awful NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR. This film here is certainly among the worst Bigfoot movies that you're going to see as everything they were going for just fails.

This was obviously meant to be a heart-warming tale of a boy and his friend ala something like E.T. but this film fails on pretty much all levels. The biggest problem is that there's really no connection between the viewers and the characters. All of the characters are pretty much one-note and even worse is the fact that the film just never builds up the relationships between them. We're supposed to care for this young boy and his father but we don't. There's supposed to be a tender moment between Bigfoot and the boy but it's silly more than anything else.

I will say that the film does offer up some decent performances but that's just about it. There's a lot of footage of various wildlife animals that is probably the most entertaining thing going on. It's really too bad that the film itself wasn't better or at least they could have used Bigfoot in more of the scenes. As it stands, CRY WILDERNESS will appeal to fans of bad movies but that's about it.

I saw this film years ago when it came to theaters for an extremely limited release. I remember the film so well because I won a door prize the day I viewed it. I watched the film with a theater full of young kids and even the kids didn't like it. Many slept and others just shook their young heads in disbelief. How could such a poor film be produced.

It's nearly impossible to put into words how awful this movie truly is. The acting and dubbing is beyond laughable, it has the worst stock footage ever and barely has anything resembling a plot. The entire world in the film seems to operate without logic or reason. Somehow the kid, Paul, makes his way into the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains after running away from boarding school because Bigfoot told him his dad was in danger. Paul is then picked up by a trucker who doesn't seem at all puzzled that a 10 year old is out there. Paul then proceeds to magically find his forest ranger dad walking around in the middle of the woods despite having no possible way of knowing where he would be, and his dad barely questions it. And that's just in the first ten minutes. The whole movie plays out like there wasn't even a script and instead the director made it up day to day. I'd recommend watching the MST3K version of this so there isn't any lasting mental scarring from the absolute mess assaulting the senses. The two people rating this movie an 8/10 and 7/10 either must've been involved in the production or actually had their sanity affected by this turd, because literally nothing in this movie is redeemable, save some nice shots of the California wilderness, and that's why it gets one star. This movie isn't healthy for children and other living things.