One of my all time favorites.

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

With a ruthless if wildly implausible plot full of coincidences and catastrophes averted by just seconds, 'Cry Terror!' doesn't quite match the elegance of most of Andrew & Virginia Stone's other location-shot thrill rides, but you probably won't care too much as a superb cast, magnificent location photography and Howard Jackson's creepy 'psychological' score all do their stuff under the baton of maestro Stone.The acting as in all Stone's films is consistently good. Rod Steiger's gang are a seriously mean bunch, and it speaks volumes that even Neville Brand - explicitly identified as both a drug addict and a convicted rapist - is frightened of Steiger.

Although this is one improbable story a great cast moves Cry Terror along. In watching this I suggest you do not take a bathroom break as you'll miss some kind of thrilling moment.James Mason is a TV repairman with wife Inger Stevens and little daughter Terry Ann Ross and during the late war he was in underwater demolition with Rod Steiger. Steiger comes to Mason with a proposition that he build some kind of triggering device that they can sell to the Navy. Only Steiger puts it on some bombs and is making extortion threats against an airline run by Carlton Young.Now that he's got Mason implicated in his extortion scheme Steiger takes Mason and family hostage and he has Stevens go to collect the payoff. She gives as much information as she can to FBI agent Kenneth Tobey and without following her, the FBI races against time to catch Steiger and his gang before they do some grievous harm to the airlines and Mason's family.Mason and Steiger are a great pair of leads and a contrasting study in acting styles just like Steiger and Humphrey Bogart were in The Harder They Fall. Stevens gives one of her best performances on the big screen as the frightened wife.Steiger's accomplices are quite a study in low lives. Jack Klugman as a punk, Neville Brand as drug addicted sex criminal, and psycho nymphomaniac Angie Dickinson are some real criminal specimens. They give good competition to the leads.It's an improbable story, but the tension never lets up the second that Steiger takes the hostages. Those last three minutes or so will stay with you forever as they did with me when I first saw Cry Terror several decades ago.

The airline is getting bomb threats. Chet Huntley reports. Mastermind Rod Steiger has an extortion scheme to collect half a million abetted by Klugman Dickinsom, and Brand. Steiger bamboozled Mason into building his bombs, then kidnaps his family to execute the plot. Interestingly, Stevens is overwrought (purposefully directed so)while nearly everyone else underplays it very effectively - UNTIL things start unwinding. Then Brand's psycho begins to freak out, Steiger's mastermind blows his cool, and Mason loses it - all very realistically done in semi-documentary fashion. I do not see the "routine" aspects others cite. These characters are quite different from the ordinary - especially Dickinson's matter-of-fact criminal who has no compunction about killing if necessary and has ice water running through her veins - a great performance. It makes fabulous use of its New York locations on a low budget. Stevens' race to make the ransom delivery on time despite being diverted by traffic miles in the wrong direction is a tour-d-force like I have seldom seen. The wrap-up is a bit melodramatic considering the tension that came before it - but only then did I breathe normally again. If you are from New York or interested in New York in the 50's, this is an edge-of-your seat treat.

The story packs a punch. OK, as suggested in the summary, there are far more global forms of terrorism now. But this sort still exists and still is awful.Neville Brand stands out as giving the best performance. Rod Steiger is good too but maybe a little studied. James Mason turns in an extremely atypical performance, right from our first view of him. He seems more dithery than a James Mason character ought to, even under the tense circumstances involved.Angie Dickinson is very good as a nasty, tough participant in the plot against Mason, his wife, their little daughter, the passengers of an airline, and the country. But Inger Stevens, the wife, is so shrill it's hard to view her as a heroine.It's a strange production. All the cars are from the Chrysler Corporation. This happened a lot in TV shows of this time but less frequently in movies.