Movie Review: Cropsey

Cropsey (2009).  Dir. Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio.

American Gothic takes a nonfiction turn in this harrowing 2009 documentary, a film where the forest-encircled, labyrinth-topping ruins of a former mental institution (Willowbrook State School, in Staten Island) furnish the central locale.  "Cropsey," the uninitiated viewer learns, was a bogeyman figure (alternately hook-handed and axe-wielding) that spooked the imaginations of a generation of Staten Island kids, but true crime trumped the urban legend in the early 1980's when an actual child abductor/killer terrorized the borough.

Zeman and Brancaccio's documentary focuses on the criminal case against the man, Andre Rand, eventually arrested.  Is this Manson-eyed drifter with a record of sexual deviance a real-life Freddy Krueger or merely a scapegoat?  The body of missing 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger was found buried in a shallow grave not far from Rand's woodland camp near Willowbrook, but only after Rand's arrest had been recounted in the media (perhaps the "real killer" planted the body there, seeking to capitalize on Rand's sudden infamy).  Aside from the question of Rand's guilt, the filmmakers consider his possible motive.  Was he supplying his abductees to a satanic cult that then sacrificed them during black masses conducted in the woods?  Did Rand pass around the children to his own pedophiliac group of followers, the squatters inhabiting Willowbrook?  Perhaps most unsettling of all is the theory that Rand was carrying out a one-man euthanasia crusade, targeting mentally-retarded youths (e.g. Schweiger had Down's Syndrome) whom he felt were better off dead.  Intriguingly, he might have drawn such a conclusion after witnessing the horrors of the Willowbrook State School for children, where he once worked as a physical therapy aide before the institution was unceremoniously closed down (indeed, the squalid conditions at Willowbrook, exposed in a news piece by a young muckraker named Geraldo Rivera, make for more disturbing viewing than any ten horror movies combined).  A potential tale of grim retribution unfolds, the notion that Staten Island's institutional sins have been visited (by Rand) upon the children of the borough's families.

Cropsey does strike a few false notes.  Zeman and Brancaccio channel bad MTV (and, of course, The Blair Witch Project) when they make an anxious nighttime exploration of the Willowbrook ruins.  A similarly contrived moment occurs when a message left by Rand on Zeman's answering machine is replayed for the audience.  Rand simply wanted to know if his last letter from prison (he was convicted for the kidnapping, but not the murder, of Schweiger) was received; the filmmakers nonetheless accentuate the ominousness, acting as if Rand were some Hannibal Lecter whose nefarious reach extended beyond the confines of his own jail cell.  At the same time, though, another ostensible shortcoming is Zeman and Brancaccio's failure to draw their own conclusions about Rand's ultimate capability.  Rather they seem intent on evoking the specter of uncertainty, with raising questions rather than offering possible answers.  But the viewer (this one, at least) doesn't leave the theater troubled by the thought that Rand's been made the victim of a widespread conspiracy.  The feeling is more one of relief that a monster no longer walks free in society.  Yes, Rand might have been convicted (and had his sentence extended in 2004, when another abduction case was reopened and brought to trial) on less-than-overwhelming evidence, yet one still senses that justice has in fact been served.

Cropsey's strengths, though, far outweigh its weaknesses.  The film is at once gripping and unsettling, never once lagging during its 84-minute runtime.  What starts out as a rumination on our mythic fears transforms into a confrontation with stark reality.  In the course of detailing the Andre Rand investigation, Cropsey exposes the seedy underbelly of late-20th Century Staten Island.  The borough is most infamously known as a garbage dump, yet also proves rife with human refuse: transients and cultists, drug addicts and alcoholics, the economically disadvantaged and the mentally disabled.  Finally, and most compellingly, the documentary illustrates how child abduction cases haunt communities long after the incidents first occurred--and how a desperation for closure often overtakes the lives of surviving family members.

Limited release has likely kept many from catching Cropsey in theaters, but this film is an absolute must-watch when it makes its way onto DVD.