Toronto Star - May 5, 1991

"Movie wastes Follows's talent"
Greg Quill

Following the yellow brick road from Avonlea to Hollywood can lead a young ingenue through some pretty rough country.

Pity poor Megan Follows, desperately in need of some grittier acting credentials than those she has earned as the ageless and perpetually innocent Anne Of Green Gables.

She must have wondered what she'd let herself in for when she started work on Cry In The Wild: The Taking Of Peggy Ann.

The young Canadian star, in her first major U.S. network vehicle, has reason now to wonder whether she has won any new professional points at all, having done little more than allow herself to be dragged through dense old logging forests for days on end by a deranged woodsman. A rag doll might have suited her part as well.

The made-for-TV movie, airing tomorrow night at 9 on Channel 57 and Buffalo's Channel 2, is a strange and disorienting, one-thread narrative based on the real-life abduction, in 1966, of a young Pennsylvania schoolgirl from the home of her poor parents outside the hamlet of Shade Gap.

For more than a week Peggy Ann Brudnick was held captive in the woods by a reclusive and psychopathic felon known only to locals as "Bicycle Pete," played here by former St. Elsewhere good guy David Morse, albeit in grotesque makeup and rotted teeth that make him utterly unrecognizable.

Morse may have known that abundant cosmetics can often cover a multitude of sins, including a script (by Durrell Royce Crays) that allows for virtually no character development and provides no great emotional punches.

It unrolls in a straight line, like a toilet paper roll unfurling down a corridor, sacrifices a couple of noble tracking dogs and a decent FBI agent (a cipher, really, rendered in a pay-the-rent cameo by Starsky And Hutch's David Soul), and ends with the inevitable and bloody shoot-em-up on a muddy farm.

Follows, when she's allowed to act, acts convincingly, even if her accent is more Delta than Appalachian.

The subject matter of Cry In The Wild and the constant threat of inhuman violence may keep some viewers glued. In fact, it's disappointing as drama, and a hollow confection that leaves you wondering: Is that all there is?

Source: Toronto Star