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.
Anyone who’s ever been a full-time caregiver, either professionally or voluntarily, knows that a strange intimacy emerges in even the coldest, most emotionally detached circumstances. There’s an agreed-upon mutual vulnerability, an acceptance that you’re going to know each other not just intimately but in a mundane way, and it breeds some strange reactions.
Night Nurse, the feature debut from writer/director Georgia Bernstein (best known as a producer on things like All Jacked Up and Full of Worms), thrives in this strangeness, and it’s at its best when it embraces it wholly and without judgement. Despite some narrative stumbles, particularly in the third act, this is an emotionally precise, compelling psychological thriller with layers to spare.
Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) has just taken a job as a nurse at a luxury retirement community, the kind where each patient has a private villa and receives 24-hour care from a pair of nurses, one for daytime and one for night. As the newbie of the group, Eleni gets night nurse duty and ends up paired with Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a charming, strangely alluring man battling dementia. With input from Douglas’s day shift nurse, Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), Eleni quickly becomes fascinated by the man, who might be a high-functioning old guy with memory issues or might just be a master con artist.
Soon, the latter impression takes hold, as Douglas ropes Eleni into his ongoing game of phone scamming other members of the community for cash. The danger of these scams, and the risk Eleni feels when she gets on the phone to pretend to be a distressed granddaughter in need of money, is intoxicating, but the longer the game goes on, the more she has to wonder: Who’s taking care of who, and what happens when the relationship starts to fray?
Bernstein approaches this narrative with an intense intimacy, a closeness to the characters and their contained little world of Douglas’s villa that hums with menace and uncertainty. From an opening credits sequence that feels worthy of Brian De Palma to a breathtaking moment when Eleni first discovers what Douglas is really up to, Bernstein leaves us no distance from these characters, and that’s by design. The closeness, helped along by inventive and painterly cinematography from Lidia Nikonova, builds a universe within Douglas’s villa, and probes Eleni’s persistent loneliness while she gets closer and closer to her charge and his schemes.
While it does function as a psychological thriller, with all the requisite darkness, tension, and destructive behavior, Night Nurse works best when it’s patient, something Bernstein and editor Alex Jacobs underscore at every opportunity. The film refuses to spoon feed its audience the details of each character’s motives and judgement, leaving us instead with the often impulsive, often intuitive decisions of Eleni, Douglas, and Mona as they move through this strange space they’ve created for themselves.
It’s a filmmaking method that leans heavily on the performances to communicate emotional subtleties, and while Bernstein’s craft is on-point, it’s the work of Paksoy and McKenzie that makes the movie. Together they’re a duo we can’t look away from, their interactions sometimes erotically charged, sometimes tender in a way that recalls a father-daughter bond, but always laced with something darker. Paksoy can make entire scenes of silence into compelling drama, and McKenzie is a relentless bomb of charm and danger.
As all of these elements swirl together, Night Nurse becomes a meditation on the strangeness of the bond between a caregiver and a patient, and how far each will go to hold up the other. Eleni enters Douglas’s world and finds a home there not because she’s innately suited to criminal enterprise, but because she finds something thrilling and genuinely satisfying in meeting the old man’s needs, even if they are sometimes nefarious. Douglas, for his part, takes satisfaction in manipulating those around him, but he also relishes the tenderness that comes from Eleni and Mona’s devotion. These elements dance around each other so delicately that it genuinely feels like just about anything could happen next, and for most of its runtime Night Nurse milks that feeling for all it’s worth.
The only place it falters, unfortunately, is in the final act, when characters move into place for a conclusion that feels only partially earned. One of the dangers of building a film so firmly on top of intuition, intimacy, and patience is what happens when you let all of that fall away in service of plotting, and Night Nurse never quite makes that transition. Rough-edged though it is, though, the ending can’t take away from the solid filmmaking foundation that built this movie, and by the third act that foundation is so firm that the film still mostly holds together.
There are stumbles in Night Nurse, as there are in basically any directorial debut, but those do little to diminish the promise at work in this movie. Georgia Bernstein is a star in the making on the indie scene, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Night Nurse is in theaters July 10.
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