Review of Cropsey (2010) by Jay H — 17 Sep 2010

I can't believe I need to make this clear: There is nobody, psychotic or not, running around the woods with a hook for a hand or a bloody axe or whatever, dismembering children, because that's the plot of a thousand retarded, derivative slasher movies from the eighties and not the actual world where we have things like Snuggies and a sandwich with pieces of fried chicken instead of bread.

But Cropsey follows in the tradition of "Paradise Lost" and "Capturing the Friedmans," another brilliant but frustrating entry in the "God, people are fucking stupid" sub-genre of true crime documentary.

Cropsey is the generic name camp counselors throughout the mid-Atlantic gave the boogeyman in the the campfire stories they'd tell their summer charges -- but central Staten Island has enough stories to fill an entire Blockbuster direct-to-video bin: a prison, an insane asylum (apparently right NEXT DOOR to a summer camp), a school for the mentally ill, a tuberculosis hospital, and several toxic waste dumps, all abandoned since the seventies and, unlike the more photogenic Danvers, hasn't been gentrified into deluxe apartments yet.

Of course the land is now home to both raging psychopaths and a Satanic conspiracy reaching the top ranks of Staten Island society and government, but touring the campus at night, all you'll run into is cliques of guido kids recreating "The Blair Witch Project.

" None of this assuages the community, naturally, when twelve-year-old Jennifer Schwieger disappears and the chief suspect is Andre Rand, a homeless man who fits the Cropsey legend perfectly, even if he doesn't fit the crime at all.

Filmmakers Josh Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio pretty much avoid the question of Rand's guilt or innocence, as it's clear that question is almost immediately irrelevant to the Schweiger family, the police, the self-proclaimed "Friends of Jennifer" vigilante group some random mother formed, or the Staten Island community.

.. although it's pretty clear that if Jennifer were thirty-five instead of twelve, if Rand were middle-class, and if he hadn't been raging and drooling on his perp walk, he wouldn't have been convicted.

Instead, the question is why: both "Why Rand?" and "Why this dumping ground of a community?" The community -- or at least, the witch-hunters in the community -- insist that theirs is just like any other small town.

"Every place has its secrets, ours just happen to be on the surface," though the more worldly Zeman and Brancaccio pretty much dismiss that. Their Staten Island is the dregs, maybe a community but certainly not a society, where the best they can get is some kind of ending to the Cropsey legend, laid at Rand's feet, keeping him in jail so they can't make a sequel, like they're living in the final scenes of "Halloween:" the killer's dead.

.. no, he's alive, hiding and regrouping, in preparation for endless sequels in the franchise. But this is the 21st century, in New York City, for God's sake, and we have trans-fats and the Ground Zero mosque, and the Bedbug-pocalypse to make us shit our pants at night.

Sooner or later, someone else is going to become "lost or missing" on Staten Island, and the shiftless kids daring each other to find Hook-Hand Man on the grounds of the old mental institution suggest that this community hasn't matured past their fears yet.