Cries in the Night (1982)

one of my absolute favorites!

Instant Favorite.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Heather (Lesleh Donaldson) our nubile teen in pigtails, arrives at Grandma Chalmers' (Kay Hawtrey) converted "tourist home" outside of Elora, Ontario. It was once a funeral home, hence the title. Maude Chalmers does an early "Psycho" scene giving away the entire mystery making the addition of the goofy guy to create a mystery a bust. The characters were stereotypes. Acting was fair, but the script didn't give them a chance.Perhaps my biggest objection was that the all black cat was named "Mittens" a named revered for cats with different colored paws, Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity. Maude wouldn't allow it.

***SPOILERS*** Maude Chlamers,Kay Hawtrey, was forced to convert the family funeral home into a bed & breakfast after her husband the undertaker & embalmer disappeared a number of years ago leaving her all alone and unable to keep it running. It's when Maude's granddaughter Heather, Lesleh Donaldson, showed up for summer vacation that people or guests at the bed & breakfast started disappearing at record levels. It wasn't until much later we get the drift in what exactly is going on in the place from Mr. Davis, Barry Morse, one of the guest there who's trying to track down his missing wife Helena who, like most of those that disappeared in the movie, was once a guest there herself.It's Heather who soon finds out the secret that her grandmother Maude has been keeping from her and the world and that put both her and her boyfriend Rick, Dean Garbett, lives in mortal danger. As for Mr. Davis his snooping around the bed & breakfast and finding out what happened to his wife cost him his life! But that soon opened up a whole can of worms in unleashing the horror that was soon to come in the film. That with the unseen ax killer losing it and, in his or her uncontrollable murder spree, exposing himself as well as uncovering a number of bodies he hid over the years on the bed & breakfast grounds.****SPOILERS**** What is an obvious re-make of "Psycho" the film "Funeral Home" like "Psycho" keeps the body count, four, low but the tension high giving it time for character development of the killer's victims where you feel that their human beings not inanimate objects like in most slasher films. The final scene where both Heather & Rick find out who's been doing the killings in fact is even more shocking then in the final scene of "Psycho"! Where in this case the two had to fight for their lives not just find out who the killer is as he or she's being apprehended before he can do any damage. There's also the mystery of the mysterious black cat that we see all throughout the film that is never explained by the scriptwriters. The black cat seems to be at the scene of every murder as if it knew, like some kind of premonition, it would happen in advance!

Yesterday I watched a 1980 horror film called 'Funeral Home'. I've been getting a lot of use out of our Amazon Prime membership during these cold winter days. This was a cross between 'Psycho', 'Little Red Riding Hood' and Ma Kettle, a character you might remember from old films. The premise was a young woman comes to help her friendly grandmother. They are turning her old funeral home into a sort of Bed and Breakfast to make money to keep the place. Grandma's husband, the funeral director, had disappeared years earlier. Also, there have been other mysterious disappearances in the area. It wasn't a bad movie, just dragged a bit at times and was predictable. It was not excessively gory, too much gore is a turn off for me. The only actor in it I recognized was Barry Morse from 'Space 1999'. If you like stories about mysterious psycho killers like '1979s 'Tourist Trap' this should fit the bill.

Not bad at all. As a proudly slumming Certified Canadian Cinema Artist, Fruet adds some juice to this elemental eighties horror scenario, getting the most out of a pretty good bunch of actors and playing each situation for as much horror, comedy or pathos as it will support. The flashbacks are well integrated, and the occasional gore is incidental to the unnervingly careful pacing and genuinely creepy atmosphere, with credit also due to Jerry Fielding's excellent score and Mark Irwin's moody-to-murky cinematography. And while it's not hard to guess where things are going, it doesn't really bother you until you get there, at which point the Psycho ripoff becomes a bit too overbearing, and the staging slips into cluttered chaos. But the critique of rural parochialism is textured with digs at equally obnoxious urban types, and the treatment of the 'slow' yard hand is refreshingly kind; they even have the grace to bury the ludicrous pop-psych wrapup under the end credits.