“Evil Mr. Rogers” is a concept that screams for the horror treatment. How has it taken this long?
Quick Plot: Young Darren loves nothing more than Mr. Crocket, a Mr. Rogers-y television show that airs during miserable dinners with his timid mother Rhonda and abusive stepfather Kevin. After a tense round of string beans, Mr. Crocket himself shows up for a bite...of Kevin.
Elsewhere in town, 8-year-old Major is struggling to understand the death of his father, deflecting with video games and outbursts while his mother Summer tries her best to move forward. He's throwing tantrums and making Mom's life pure misery. Self-help parenting tapes do little to aid Summer, but when a clamshell-cased episode of Mr. Crocket shows up in the free mailbox outside her home, she figures it's worth a try.
Major is hooked, and it only takes a few days for Mr. Crocket to take hold (figuratively and literally). Like Darren, Major seems to have vanished through his living room walls, leaving Summer fraught with an unbelievable story and heavy heart.
The police don't believe her, even though several other missing children in town have followed the same pattern. A little library research leads Summer to Rhonda and Eddie, whose daughter went missing under similar circumstances. Together, they decide to open Mr. Crocket’s door and retrieve their children.
It’s not quite as easy as one would hope. The bright colors of the VHS set prove to be far darker in Mr. Crocket’s actual hell, a violent landscape born out of the horrors of collective abuse curated by its own Freddy Kruegger-ish host.
Expanded from a short film, Mr. Crocket is a fabulous concept and a good final product. Carl Reid and director Brandon Espy’s script is filled with clever ideas and clearly has some deep things to explore regarding what it means to grow up in a home marked by violence. Doing so through a murderous Mr. Rogers is pretty genius.
The film doesn’t quite live up to it. You can feel the budget bursting, particularly in the somewhat muddled finale. I don’t know what the time frame was from short film to feature, but the final script probably needed one more draft or ten more minutes of runtime to feel complete. It’s disappointing only because the idea is so fresh. Overall, this is a solid little film that’s quite enjoyable, even if it doesn’t quite meet its own expectations.
High Points
As the titular Mr. Crocket, Elvis Nolasco is clearly relishing the opportunity to play such a twisted character. It’s a juicy performance that goes a very long way
Low Points
I realize more and more every day that audiences aren’t quite as smart as I would think, but it still irks me when a movie feels the need to lay out its themes so directly. “I was born in the fires of hell and abuse” should be subtext, not actual dialogue
High/Low Point You Should Only Read To Be Spoiled
I wondered a LOT about Alex Akpobome’s choices in playing Eddie. Bad casting or bad acting? Turns out, neither, because the character isn’t at all what you think (thank goodness)
Lessons Learned
Junk food just makes you sleepy and tired
One should always use some caution with free libraries, but particularly in the 1980s when they weren’t actually a thing
Further Reading
While watching Mr. Crocket, I found myself thinking a lot about Kiersten White’s Mr. Magic, a genre novel that plays with a similar setup involving an ‘80s style children’s show gone wrong. The one is more Mormons meet Romper Room, but if you were looking for another spin on this kind of setup, give it a read.
Rent/Bury/Buy
Mr. Crocket is a little rough around the edges, but it’s such a fresh idea that any horror fan (particularly one who spends far too much time complaining about sequels and reboots) really owes it to the genre to give it a watch. It’s a quick 90 minutes on Hulu.
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