Cry Baby Lane

Cry Baby Lane is a scary movie for kids that was aired by Nickelodeon at Halloween in 2000. After it aired, a huge number of outraged parents called Nickelodeon, complaining that the movie was way too disturbing. Nickelodeon effectively banned the movie, never airing it again, and never releasing on video or DVD.

For 11 years, Cry Baby Lane was considered a lost film, and on the Internet, a legend grew up around it. People said it was a crazed and horrific movie, stuffed full of blood, guts, cannibalism and much more.

I managed to find a copy of the movie on the Internet and watched it. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as scary as people made it out to be. It’s just like a feature-length episode of Are You Afraid of The Dark or Goosebumps.

Cry Baby Lane is about two boys who enjoy listening to scary ghost stories. The local undertaker tells them the tale of a local farmer whose wife gave birth to Siamese twins, one good, one evil:

“It all happened some time ago. There was a farmer whose wife gave birth to twins. But something was terribly wrong. Due to a rare embryonic mutation, the infants joined as one flesh and came into this world freaks and the farmer hid them away. As they grew, it became clear that one was good and the other was evil. Now, it happened that one of the twins fell ill, and because they shared the same liver, the illness quickly spread and they both perished. Not wanting to expose his shame, the farmer decided to unjoin the bodies, and buried only the good son in the town cemetery. He buried the evil son in a field at the end of an old dirt road called Cry Baby Lane. Because, legend has it, anyone caught out there at night on that desolate road can hear the cries of the evil child calling for vengeance from beyond the grave.”

After hearing this story, the boys decide that a good way to impress some teenage girls is to hold a seance in the cemetery where the good twin is buried. They wind up unintentionally awakening the evil twin instead. Gradually, the evil twin possesses nearly everyone in town and it is up to the boys to stop him.

The movie is not scary. The evil twin is a guy with white, glowing eyes and long fingernails who eats worms. The only part that even comes close to being creepy is when a spider crawls out of a little girl’s mouth and onto her tongue.

Note: There is actually a real Cry Baby Lane in Raleigh, North Carolina. There was a Catholic orphanage that housed a few dozen young boys and girls. One night in 1958, a priest accidentally started a fire. The children were trapped in the orphanage dormitory and burned to death in the flaming building. Months after the fire, the neighbors complained that they could hear the ghostly voices of children, crying and screaming in fear and pain. They say that if you go there late at night, you can still hear the screams of the orphaned children who died in the fire.