Taking something
sweet and comforting and twisting it into something unsettling is a staple of a
lot of horror films. When was the last time someone truly appreciated clowns as
they were originally supposed to be appreciated, instead of thinking of them as
creepy demons that feast on the flesh of innocents? It’s a trope that takes
away our safe spaces, giving us no safe harbor to run to when the scary begins.
In this tradition, Mr. Crocket turns the idea of a friendly
kids show character onto its head and the result is as campy and bloody as
you’d expect, but it doesn’t offer anything new or interesting while doing so.
There is a “mascot horror” trend going on in
the world of video games, where independent studios, inspired by the hugely
popular Five Nights at Freddy’s series, pump out cheap horror
games led by creatures that should be cute and child friendly but instead have
sharp teeth and kill you. None of them really have any soul and only exist to
sell merchandise and go viral, and Mr. Crocket feels a bit
like one of these games. It’s as if the writers looked at a list of things that
children like and asked themselves “what hasn’t been exploited in the world of
horror yet?” and picked Mr. Rogers. Mr. Crocket gleefully kills those he
considers bad parents with subversive kids stuff, his cuddly sidekick creatures
are actually Jim Henson puppets from hell, and everything is shocking and gory
instead of fluffy and nice. Blah blah blah.
None of it is particularly scary and all of
it is astonishingly predictable. Every horror trope is in here, from the random
bystander that just happens to have the exposition needed to keep the film
going to the microfiche research montage to the villain monologue that explains
their entire spooky backstory. The characters are thinner than a clown who has
gone too long without human flesh and the rules behind the supernatural forces
are murky and vague. There just isn’t anything new here.
The acting is pretty good, especially that
of Elvis Nolasco, who plays the titular character with a Freddy Krueger-esque
mixture of menace and campy glee. And I do appreciate that the special effects
are predominantly practical rather than digital. As someone who has always
found E.T. and other practical puppets terrifying (except you, Yoda, you’re
cool), I found the designs of Mr. Crocket’s “friends” to easily be the most
unsettling thing about the film, even if the creativity for some started and
ended with “put sharp teeth on it and make it look all decayed looking.”
As I write this two hours after watching the
film I find myself constantly having to go back and check what exactly the name
of the character/movie actually was. Was it Mr. Cranston? Mr. Cormick? I know
it started with a C… this was my experience with the film in a nutshell. It was
here, it held my eyeballs for ninety minutes, and then it was gone.
Mr. Crocket (that’s it!) is now
available on Hulu.
This review was first published in the
Keizertimes on October 18th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.
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