By JT REID for the Keizertimes
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.
