Movie Review: Cropsey (2009)

Childhood legends are created to terrify us into being good. There's the Boogeyman, the stranger with the lost dog and a pocket full of candy, and even Santa Claus. On Staten Island in New York, there was the legend of Cropsey. Cropsey was supposedly a mental patient who escaped a place called Willowbrook and murdered children in the night. The filmmakers recall hearing all of that when they were young, and they talk to a few people about it. That's about the first ten minutes, and then they go on to something else that's not really related, but they try to connect it. Most of the documentary has nothing to do with this legend, which did nothing less than annoy the bejesus out of me for the entirety of the film.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, several mentally handicapped children disappeared from Staten Island. The story focuses on Andre Rand, the man eventually convicted of all of the disappearances and murders of the kids, but the connection to Cropsey is loose at best. The story is interesting, but not because off the filmmakers. They're definitely ametuerish, and I think they're doing whatever they think they're supposed to do on camera. They act overly shocked about everything, including letters they write back and forth with Rand.

I like documentaries, and the story about Rand and these kids is interesting. You really have to decide for yourself whether he did it or the court system just railroaded a nut just to make the community happy. I wish the filmmakers didn't shoehorn the legend of Cropsey in the beginning and then just forget that part of the movie. Them connecting Rand to Cropsey is the equivalent of me connecting John Wayne Gacy to Bozo. They were both in the Chicago area, so, good enough! No, not at all. I think these guys started making one movie and Scotch taped another to it. Again, good story, but it could have been made better. They should have just made it about these missing kids and left the Cropsey angle by the wayside.