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.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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