Film Review: “Cropsey”
Cropsey isn’t a great documentary, but it is a really good one. As a work, it exists somewhere in the continuum between a cable news “true crime” special and a self conscious film school project.
The title refers to a variation of the familiar “homicidal maniac” urban legends specific to Staten Island. Like all legends, there are as many versions as there are storytellers, but the common thread is that “Cropsey” waits in the woods for unwary children and teenagers.
The film explores the parallels between the story and the case of Andre Rand, whom the media dubbed a “real life Cropsey” after he was accused and convicted of the kidnapping and murder of a young girl named Jennifer. Rand had worked as an orderly at a disgraced mental facility, Willowbrook Mental Institution, and continued to live on the grounds after the facility closed. The girl’s remains were found near one of her campsites.
Through the film, we meet various players in the story: police detectives, witnesses, family members of the victims (there may have been more murders), and members of the community. Understandably, each of these people bears marks from the incident, though not always to the degree or in the way we’d expect.
Some of the people in the film are fascinating. One woman, the founder of a group called “Friends of Jennifer,” still, two decades later, spends her spare time searching the several hundred acres of woods around Willowbrook for the bodies of other missing children that she believes Rand murdered. Another man, an old acquaintance of Randwho apparently believes he was framed, looks like a bit of a drifter, but speaks intelligently and soberly about how stories and images can be framed to cast suspicion of guilt.
Rand himself is a cipher. He never agreed to be interviewed on camera, though he did send carefully worded correspondence to the filmmakers that laid out the case for his innocence. The old video footage and testimony of the police in the case make him seem alternately deranged, evil, or pitiful. The letters he writes seem to come from a bright and focused mind.
The most affecting moments in the film are actually excerpts from another documentary, and exposé of Willowbrook Mental Institution by none other than a young Geraldo Rivera. In grainy video footage we see patients, naked and neglected, lying on the floor in filth. Given Rivera’s career, I’m sure these moments were calculated for peak sensationalism, but the fact remains that they did happen, and I found the footage nearly too disturbing to watch.
The film’s biggest weakness is the filmmakers themselves. Perhaps inevitably with this sort of story, the filmmakers have chosen to narrate and appear in the film as they track down the story of Andre Rand. I found them distracting, and their personal reflections didn’t add anything more to the story, but this is a small flaw in a film that hits nearly many of my personal obsessions: urban legends, the reliability of memory, rumors of satanic cults, and abandoned mental institutions.
“Cropsey” is on Netflix streaming. Check it out, preferably during the daylight hours.
