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.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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