Review of Cropsey (2010) by Ed Fucking H — 20 Jun 2011

If the name Cropsey sounds familiar to you, you've probably seen the classic Slasher the Burning about a madman who lives in the woods and likes to hack up young horny teenagers. This isn't about that, but about the real life urban legend of Staten Island New York.

This film started out about the urban legend at least but then switched focus to a convicted child killer named Andre Rand, whos parallels with the Urban Legend are uncanny. He lived in the woods, and was convicted of killing at least one mentally disabled child (based on shoddy evidence) and is suspected of at least 4 more.

He was a former attendee at a school/instituion for the mentally handicapped that has since been shut down called Willowbrook, and him and a number of former employees and patients were known to live in the abandoned building as well as in the underground tunnel systems of the building.

Willowbrook was also quite the controversial instituion in it's day due to it's unhumanitarian treatment of it's patients. Some footage is shown of the place in it's heyday and it is disturbing and sickening to say the least.

The film goes on to explore the case, a look at Andre Rand (both from former friends and some of his main accusors), the going on's of Willowbrook, and some of the crossover with the Cropsey Urban Legend.

All in all a very good and intresting True Crime documentary. I liked that the filmmakers wanted to explore this case and compare it to the Urban Legend, but I think as the movie developed they lost interest in exploring the urban legend and focused more on the case itself which was a little dissappointing for me as this was the most intresting thing about the film for me.

Still though a very good Doc that is worth seeing for people intrested in true crime.