Fantastic Fest 2009: ‘Cropsey’ Review

Cropsey is an urban legend from Staten Island NY. The villain changes from wielding hooks to knives to axes but the outcome always ends with children getting cut up into tiny pieces and buried in the woods. The legend spread and documentary film makers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio both thought that maybe the legend is there for a reason… maybe it’s real.

Cropsey dives into this mystery by questioning whether or not a series of missing kids over the course of 20 years is what spawned the legend. The possible perpetrator of these kidnappings and murders is Adrian Rand, a man who used to work in an insane asylum for children in Staten Island. After a really big news expose’ by Giraldo Rivera in the 1980s the asylum closed and Rand was  left without a job, roaming the woods around the “school”.

Sadly the film doesn’t really stick with the legend of Cropsey much more than saying they all grew up with it. Instead the film boils down into whether or not Rand is really this murdering sociopath. We meet the parents of the kids, families that looked for the bodies of the kids, and more. It’s a truly creepy and disturbing story and you will get sucked in.

Without the initial premise though, this film is really just a documentary that could be on any crime channel. It doesn’t elevate itself beyond a tv doc level.