During the opening minutes of this movie, a narrator says: “Due to a rare embryonic mutation, two infants were joined as one flesh and came into this world as freaks.”
I had no idea that Nickelodeon went so hard.
Cry Baby Lane is a made-for-Nickelodeon horror movie that was originally broadcast on October 28, 2000, complete with Halloween-themed host segments starring Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina the Teenage Witch. After reading that sentence, there’s a good chance you’re making the same face you’d make if your sibling ripped a fart in response to some good news that you shared with them . . . which, coincidentally, is something that happens in this movie. But you can turn that “Peeyoo!” into a “Wahoo!” Because Cry Baby Lane joins The Peanut Butter Solution and Mac and Me as a children’s movie that is possibly just as distressing for children as a viewing of Faces of Death.
Andrew and his older brother Carl like to hang out at the local funeral home. It’s there that Mr. Bennett (Frank Langella), the mortician, spooks ‘em with stories of urban legends. The brothers obsess over a story that concerns conjoined twins who died after being separated with a chainsaw. The “evil” twin was buried next to an old dirt road named Cry Baby Lane. Naturally, Andrew and Carl invite three girls from school to partake in a seance next to the grave. One of the girls says “I wanna bring back Princess Di!” But before that can happen, the seance triggers a series of events that eventually transform the town’s residents into white-eyed psychopaths.
In the early 2000s, the term creepypasta emerged to describe horror-based legends that originated on the Internet. A subset of creepypasta was focused on lost TV episodes that were banned. Cry Baby Lane was broadcast once by Nickelodeon and never released on home video, so it became an early creepypasta myth. The assumption was that the network allegedly buried the film because of its controversial content. In 2011, the truth was revealed. And it was much more banal. Despite the debunking, the magic of this movie lingers. Like the original Blair Witch Project website, Cry Baby Lane is an artifact of a simpler time. A time when the Internet wasn’t so heavy. A time when a Nickelodeon movie could include a scene where a 10-year-old kid hallucinates that his feet are turning into worms.
The bewitching vibe of Cry Baby Lane isn’t due to its static photography or ordinary plot. Or even in the fact that it was an early creepypasta. It’s in the details. Emanating from a mist of second generation VHS glitches, this movie assembles a series of bizarre situations that are built to unsettle kids of all ages. In addition to the frequent worm hallucinations, we get Nightmare on Elm Street-styled sequences where kids are teleported to the underground lair of a Joker-esque ghoul. A 9-year-old asks his 11-year-old friend if he’ll consider marrying his mom, so that they can all live in the same house together. An adolescent kiss gets cut short when a spider appears in someone’s mouth. It all culminates with a scene where Andrew is stripped down to his underwear, attacked by girls throwing grapefruits, and chased through the woods by a bull. Calling Dr. Freud!
The original broadcast recording of Cry Baby Lane on Internet Archive includes commercials for Pokémon cards, a Barbie karaoke playset (“Plug in your favorite CD and sing along!”), and Playstation games. I’m no expert, but you should probably make the world a better place by watching it immediately.
