Reviews
‘Mr. Crocket’ Review – Impressive Effects Can’t Save a Pedestrian Script [FF 2024]
1980s nostalgia is out and 1990s nostalgia is in, with the horror genre doling out films like I Saw the TV Glow (review) and now Mr. Crocket, an adaptation of Brandon Espy’s 2022 short of the same name (itself a part of Hulu’s Bite Size Halloween series). Espy’s feature debut sadly sees the filmmaker struggling to find inspiration, working with a pedestrian script despite some impressive gore effects and puppetry.
It’s 1994 in the town of Shurry Bottom, PA, and Summer (Jerrika Hinton, Hunters) has recently been widowed following the tragic death of her husband. She’s left to raise their son Major (Ayden Gavin) on her own, but finds herself struggling to deal with his public outbursts and temper tantrums as he attempts to process his own grief. Following a particularly nasty fight between the two of them, a magic mailbox suddenly appears in their front yard, delivering a VHS tape of an old children’s show called Mr. Crocket’s World. It’s not long before Mr. Crocket (Elvis Nolasco, Godfather of Harlem) himself crawls out of Summer’s television screen and kidnaps Major, forcing her to face her own demons and save her son before he’s permanently trapped in Crocket’s hellish world.
Espy apes a lot from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series while sticking to tired tropes as his film limps to the finish line. There’s enough material to fill the runtime, so while this isn’t a case of a short being unnecessarily stretched to feature length, the execution is notably lacking. It makes similar, mediocre films like The Banana Splits Movie and Willy’s Wonderland look practically innovative by comparison. Hell, you’ll find a better magic mailbox movie in The Lake House.
Where Mr. Crocket excels is in its puppetry and practical gore effects. A cold open that homages (or rips off, you decide) Greta’s death in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 is particularly gruesome, as is another sequence involving a gun that fires bubbles instead of bullets. Money was well spent there, and the same applies to the devilish puppets that act as Crocket’s underling’s (a welcome addition that wasn’t included in the original short). These have a decidedly low-budget feel to them, similar to what you’d see in a ’90s-era Nickelodeon show. One might wonder why the children aren’t even the slightest bit afraid of these creations, but they’re honestly not that far off from some of the imagery you’d find in The Ren & Stimpy Show or Courage the Cowardly Dog (the ’90s were a wild time!). The more phantasmagorical imagery, however, call to mind the aforementioned’90s-set I Saw the TV Glow, a film that has far more ambition than Mr. Crocket.
Crocket, an amalgamation of classic children’s television show hosts like Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow‘s LeVar Burton, is a decent enough antagonist, but Espy can’t make him the Freddy Krueger-type figure he so clearly wants him to be. Any mystique the character has is wiped away during an admittedly impressive animated story time sequence that doles out clunky exposition for the character. Less would have been more here.
Performances are all serviceable, with Hinton finding the pathos in a good mother who makes one terrible mistake, but Espy’s screenplay doesn’t give her much to work with. The grief she feels over her husband’s passing is never really explored, with an early funeral scene meant to stand in for legitimate character development. Shortcuts like this only hinder Mr. Crocket, reducing what could have been a layered interrogation of parental struggles to a hokey footnote in horror canon. Had Espy leaned more into camp (one of the puppet creatures screaming “Do it, pussy!” elicits the appropriate laughs) there would be some fun to be had, but those moments are so few and far between that they don’t mesh well with the more serious approach he takes to the parenting aspects of the story.
Attention to period detail is minimal, seeing Espy populating his sets with VHS players, tube TVs and a Game Gear, or slapping Casper on a movie theater marquee, as if those alone will suffice. Visually, the film has a sheen to it that betrays its period setting, making it feel distinctly modern. The lore of Crocket’s world is ill-defined, but the production design is somewhat striking, with its colorful textures offering a welcome reprieve from the duller real-world locations.
All of this might be somewhat forgivable if Espy’s screenplay didn’t follow every horror movie trope with the utmost devotion. We’ve got nightmare fake-outs, an obligatory microfiche investigation, a Chekhov’s dead dad’s whistle whose sentimental value may be able to fight off Crocket (spoiler alert: it will), and about halfway into the runtime we get the introduction of a new character who may or may not have ulterior motives (spoiler alert: they do, and their heel-turn is not the least bit surprising by the time it’s revealed at the most inopportune time for Summer).
The cons outweigh the pros in Mr. Crocket, seeing Espy expand upon his short film with a pedestrian script and an overall lack of inspiration. The practical effects are laudable, but they’re not enough to save a feature that should have just been left as a short.
Mr. Crocket had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and will be released on Hulu on October 11.
Writer/director Izabel Pakzad built her feature directorial debut, Find Your Friends, from her own experience, an ominous car chase on a desert road late one night in the middle of a girls’ trip. That frightening pursuit, the sense of being cornered in a world with a baseline hostility to women, is the seed from which a compelling thriller grows.
But it’s not the whole story.
Starting with her own experiences might have been Pazkad’s catalyst, but Find Your Friends works because it’s willing to not just interrogate these threats, but to allow its characters to exist in a way that makes them far from perfect horror movie victims when those threats arrive. Intense, confrontational, and relentless, this is a film that begins as a psychological unraveling, then descends into revenge movie madness, all with a style perfect for the Euphoria generation.
Amber (Helena Howard) just went through a difficult breakup, and she’s looking forward to cutting loose during a trip out to the desert with her friends Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zion Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali). Her friends all think that what Amber needs is some drinks, drugs, and fun rebound sex, but Amber’s not so sure, particularly after her first attempt to hook up with a guy ends in the kind of casual sexual assault that’s easy for anyone who didn’t witness it to brush off.
Still, when the ladies make it out to Joshua Tree for their getaway, everyone’s in high spirits, and Amber’s hoping to put the past behind her and get lost in music and mood-altering substances. But the past won’t fade quite so easily, and the quintet of friends is about to find out that the present is even more frightening.
Structurally, this is a classic plot-driven thriller in which the decisions of the characters and their reactions to adversity inform who they are. We meet Amber and her friends mid-party, and aside from a couple of quiet moments, the party basically never ends, whether the girls are taking Molly at a desert concert or doing mushrooms in the wilderness. Along the way, we come to understand that, with adult responsibilities looming in their lives, these young women are all afraid of drifting apart, and they hope that a maelstrom of experience will bond them in such a way that they’ll reunite for a girls’ trip everywhere.
They’re trying to cling, often unhealthily, to a world in which they can hold each other up, and no one seems to need that more than Amber. Some characters don’t get as much detail brushed in as others – it’s really Amber’s movie despite its ensemble tendencies – but Howard, Thorne, and Moreno in particular imbue the film with emotional weight and palpable tension.
That tension comes from a few different places, whether it’s Amber trying to hold her friends responsible for what she considers abandonment at a key moment or Lavinia trying to wring every last drop of fun from the trip at all costs, but it’s most evident in the way the girls engage with their environment. If you’ve ever visited any kind of major party destination for twentysomethings, you’ve met these women. I bumped into an almost identical group recently at a resort in San Juan, and I’m sure I’m not alone in my sense of recognition.
These women are loud, energetic, intoxicated, and fiercely devoted both to each other and to their shared goal of shutting out the wider world in favor of an experience they curate together. While their behavior might be jarring at first, especially if you’re an old homebody like me, you soon realize that it’s the whole point of the dramatic tension Pakzad has set out to establish.
These characters need to be loud, profane, sometimes even self-centered and annoying, because Find Your Friends is a movie that dares you to dislike them. Why? Because Pazkad is interested not just in the slowly unfolding revenge narrative in the film, or in the way Amber’s psyche fractures under the weight of increasingly isolating experiences, but in forcing her audience to confront their own biases. In the eyes of a misogynistic viewer, these women seem to be doing a textbook version of “asking for it” or “being a tease.” They drink, they twerk, they speak frankly and openly about their sexual experiences, and they’re not shy about what they want when it comes to men.
Pakzad places all of this deliberately in our faces so that, when the violence and confusion start to kick in, we’re forced to consider our own internalized misogyny and judgment of women like these. If you’ve ever chastised a horror movie character for making a bad decision, Find Your Friends wants to throw that judgment back in your face. It is a wonderfully thorny exploration of the film’s themes, and it creates a thread of piano wire-tight tension that builds to one of the year’s most unforgettable horror crescendos.
The film’s thematic oomph and the sheer energy of its pacing, helped along by editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia and cinematographer Tim Curtin, is strong enough to mask some of its minor flaws. It could stand a bit more nuance, some tighter plotting, perhaps a bit quieter to let its ideas settle into place around the parties and the mayhem, but the film is so immediate and sensuous in its presentation, helped along by a pulsing soundtrack, that these things barely have time to take root in your mind.
This is a dreamy, feral little movie with a taste for blood, and I hope it finds the audience it deserves.
Find Your Friends arrives June 12 on Shudder.
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