Cropsey is the name that kids on Staten Island gave to a boogie man who allegedly kidnapped kids, cut them up and dumped their bodies in the woods. We are told at the beginning of the film that this was always an urban legend there until the late-1970s when a few kids actually did start going missing and at least one of their bodies was discovered in the woods. This documentary shows the police chase to find the murder and the media and legal trials that followed for the man they caught.
Soon after the massive man-hunt began on Staten Island, loner and homeless man Andre Rand was caught. He had been an orderly on the island's child mental hospital which was notorious for its inhumane living conditions for the kids. When the hospital was shut down, he stayed in the woods near the hospital ling in tents and scavenging.
At the time of his arrest, an unfortunate picture was snapped of him, looking insane and with drool coming out of his mouth. The local newspaper ran this photo under a headline suggesting that the "drifter" was arrested for the murder. This sealed his fate in the minds of his would-be jurors. Now in the present day, he is being tried for the murder of a second girl that same summer and the filmmakers go out looking for more information on Rand's past and the crimes themselves.
At it's core, this film feels like a poor-man's Paradise Lost, the brilliant documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about two unfortunate teens who were charged and convicted with murder because they dressed weird in their rural school. Here, directors Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman suggest that part of Rand's problem is that everyone was looking for a killer and he fit the bill, so he was convicted. They do suggest that he was probably guilty - and certainly was weird - but there is certainly an understanding that he didn't get a totally fair trial (and there is a suggestion that the trial in the present day is also not totally fair either).
My least favorite part of the film is that Brancaccio and Zeman become characters in the story as they hunt around for information. I don't really care about their story - I care about Rand and the story of the murders. To bring the story back around to them, I think is a sloppy byproduct of a badly conceived script (the movie is not called "Cropsey, Brancaccio and Zeman" after all).
This is a good movie, but not a great movie. It's interesting and shows some interesting stuff that I didn't know about mental health in New York up through the '70s. Still, I think overall this is a bit of a good story base that never really pans out. I'm not sure what their idea was with this doc (to make a movie about Rand, about the search for hard-to-find information), but the end result is not totally satisfying and rather choppy.
Stars: 2 of 4
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