Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mr. Crocket’ on Hulu, a Kitschy Horror-Comedy About a Demented Kid’s-show Host

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The title character of Mr. Crocket ( now streaming on Hulu ) is like Mr. Rogers if he was played by Richard Pryor and directed by a ca.-1990 Peter Jackson – but considerably tamed. Consider me disappointed by that last part. This kitschy, splattery satire is from filmmaker Brandon Espy, who turned his six-minute short (seen as part of Hulu’s Bite Size Halloween series) about a crazed kiddie-show host into a feature-length film that Remembers The ’90s really hard, and in doing so, fetishizes VCRs and tube-TV static and the like. We’ve seen this type of nostalgic weirdness before, for sure, but let’s see if it still works this time around.

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The Gist: SHURRY BOTTOM, PENNSYLVANIA, 1993. You may recall that kid-friendly VHS tapes came in squishy plastic clamshell cases so you could drop it and toss it around and still keep the tape safe. Mr. Crocket’s World lives in one of those cases. It’s precious, this content. The show hails from the heyday of extra-puppety PBS children’s shows, when a human host danced and sang and taught life lessons amidst talking trash monsters and primary-colored anthropomorphs. They were all a step or a step-and-a-half away from hallucinatory madness (he says, recalling the glory days of The Great Space Coaster ). Mr. Crocket (Elvis Nolasco) is one of those hosts. We meet him as he vamps and mugs from the TV set in a far-from-idyllic home where a shitty dad threatens violence to his boy if he won’t eat his peas ‘n’ carrots. Mr. Crocket peers out from the VCR slot and emerges from The Other Side Of The Screen and murders the father in a very disgusting manner and snatches the boy while the mother, Rhonda (Kristolyn Lloyd), watches in a daze.

Time passes. It’s 1994 now. Summer (Jerrika Hinton) and her eight-year-old son Major (Ayden Gavin) mourn the untimely passing of their husband/father. She’s sad and depressed and struggling to pay the bills, and the boy’s acting out. Yelling, breaking stuff, disobeying. She’s at wit’s end. Now, 1994 wasn’t a time when you plopped the kid in front of a child therapist. No, four out of five doctors recommended that you plop them in front of the TV so they’re distracted from their destructive behavior. One of those share-a-book little-library boxes (is this an anachronism? Feels like it) appears on the front lawn one day and in it is the Mr. Crocket clamshell. Desperate, Summer slides in the tape and sure enough, little Major is too hypnotized by Mr. Crocket’s happy-happy-joy-joy sharing-is-caring platitudes to resume tormenting his mother.

You know where this is headed: Summer walks into the living room one night and Mr. Crocket won’t shut off. Press the button, new batteries in the remote, unplug the TV, throw the TV into the ocean, nuke the TV from orbit – nothing works. Mr. Crocket keeps smiling his upsettingly toothy insanity-smile and pontificating about kindness to a buffalo hand puppet. And then, of course, he emerges from the static to snatch Major and take him away to hell or heck or wherever the hell/heck he takes children. Turns out, this is part of a local epidemic – Mr. Crocket has snatched a bunch of children, which unites Summer with Eddie (Alex Akpobome) and Rhonda, who’s now a crazy homeless lady. They gonna get their kids back? Probably! But it isn’t gonna be easy, that’s for damn sure.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I Saw the TV Glow fetishized this brand of ’90s nostalgia in a far more original, artful and provocative manner. Otherwise, we’ve got bits of Meet the Feebles and Death to Smoochy here, and the Crocket show plays like an extra-demented Pee-Wee’s Playhouse .

Performance Worth Watching: Nelasco, a longtime working actor, may become a minor cult figure (read: 14th-billed at horror cons) for his OTT-psycho riff on children’s show hosts.

Memorable Dialogue: Summer: “F—in’ public television. I want my damn donation back.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: You gotta hand it to Espy – he pretty much bullseyes the throwback aesthetic of movies that ended up on USA Up All Night (with commentary during the commercial bumpers by Rhonda Shear, he said with a swoon). He effectively deploys squelchy practical splatter effects, neato-cheapo sets and a fetish for whirr-and-click VHS noises, getting the visual textures of mid-’90s ephemera right. Mr. Crocket’s top-row dentures are practically a character of their own, gleaming impossibly white as our guy indulges a little knife-goes-in-guts-come-out murder-violence.

Problem is, none of this is particularly funny or scary, and the writing is rote and predictable. Mr. Crocket feels far too deferent to era-specific genre films, from its sluggish pace to its supernatural-nonsense quasi-revenge story. (It even has the now-wearisome scene in which the protagonist Googles the history of the villain, albeit in an era-specific manner: library microfiche!) Beneath the spilling guts, admirably deranged splashes of color and tired old plot is a simplistic message about the cycle of abuse that seems informed by afterschool specials from 1981.

The familiar tropes might be more endearing if the film as a whole didn’t feel so tame, as if Espy lacked the nerve to truly push any envelopes of good taste or aesthetics. The film isn’t nearly creepy, funny or suspenseful enough to stand out among similarly self-conscious horror-satires, and comes off like a middling episode of Hulu’s now-defunct Blumhouse anthology series Into the Dark . All the inspired visuals in the world, it seems, will never compensate for a mediocre screenplay.

Our Call: Mr. Crocket is better in concept than execution. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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