Critics’ Slaps Fail to Hinder ‘China Cry’ Receipts : Movies: Film produced by Tustin-based TBN goes into general re-release. Ticket sales have already topped $4 million.

Reviews for “China Cry,” the inspirational movie produced by Tustin-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, were mostly downbeat when it opened in New York last week as part of a national re-release, but that didn’t prevent ticket sales from topping $4 million since its release last fall.

The New York Times’ Steven Holden said the film “has many of the features of a Hollywood epic except that it is set in the 20th Century. . . . ‘China Cry’ would like to be the Asian-American answer to ‘Ben Hur’ but the tale is told too choppily to gather much momentum, and the acting is tentative.”

Based on the life of Chinese-American evangelist Nora Lam, the film was produced by Trinity’s founder and president, Paul R. Crouch, with $6 million in donations from viewers of his 24-hour-a-day Christian programming service and worldwide television network. It opened in Southern California last November.

All four major New York newspaper reviewers were critical of “China Cry,” which deals with Lam’s life as a pampered child in Shanghai and, later, as a persecuted Christian after the 1949 Communist revolution.

New York Newsday said much of the film “strains credulity--the risible dialogue, the homiletic tone, the stilted acting and direction. . . . Religious skepticism alone won’t explain the snickers in the theater,” notwithstanding “a few moments of emotional power.”

The New York Daily News was the most upbeat, noting that Lam’s “amazing life story is now an intriguing, but minor motion picture,” which “has everything--romance, human suffering and even a possible miracle.” Unfortunately, said reviewer Kathleen Carroll, “the insipid dialogue hardly matches the emotionally powerful situations.”

On the brighter side, “China Cry” is playing in nearly 150 theaters across the country and ticket sales have reached $4.008 million, according to the film’s distributor, Tim Penland. Sales are also doing well for the movie’s soundtrack, a Warner Bros. Records release featuring Irene Cara singing the score, by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn.

Penland called the box office response so far “very gratifying . . . We’ve been very successful with a little film that nobody wanted.”

As a result, Penland said, TBN films is already in pre-production for its next movie, the details of which he said would be released soon. Negotiations also are under way for cable television, videocassette and foreign theatrical rights for “China Cry.”