“Mr. Crocket” (2024) Review

I grew up with Mister Rogers and his gentle TV program felt like a mellow and engaging visit to the grandparents. While I had a stable family to turn to for advice and support, others did not and likely viewed this charming TV character as their safer adult to turn towards. Mr. Crocket is a horror film that taps into the allure and dangers of such a TV show, where even the colorful world of educational TV can be just as flawed as the parents who raise us. Although there’s a more straightforward supernatural resolve for this format, the atmosphere is creepy and themes strong enough to make the film more appealing beyond the concept of “What if a kid-show host was a demon from hell who stole kids in 1993?”

Elvis Nolasco’s performance as the titular Mr. Crocket is a big part of what makes this film work. On television, he’s an eccentric host with magical markers and singing puppets, gleefully addressing his kid-actor guests like Bill Cosby fused with Pee-Wee Herman. He only appears in the form of a VHS tape for children with abusive parents. With repeated viewings, Crocket lures the kids into accepting him so much that they’re willing to run off to his dimension. They might even delight in him slicing open their cruel parents/step-parents with vicious approaches to teaching them lessons. A lesson about eating healthy foods, for example, involves him force-feeding mush through a stepdad’s cut-open stomach.

Crocket’s latest target is Major (Ayden Gavin), an angry young man who has recently lost his father. His grieving mother, Summer (Jerrika Hinton), can’t handle him. She tries to be a good mom, but her child has become so destructive and unruly that she starts to give up. That’s when Crocket’s magical VHS arrives to subdue Major’s aggressive attitude. It isn’t long before Major is whisked away, and Summer needs to solve the mystery and become a better mom. It will take more than condemning technology to stop this kid-snatching demon in a bowtie.

There’s a steady stream of fascinating twists to always keep this TV-based horror compelling. The backstory of Crocket is fairly interesting, presenting him as a failure who signed a deal with the devil. The investigation proceeds well enough, with horrified parents trying to warn of Crocket’s coming and his history being divulged in microfiche at the library. There’s the obligatory threats Crocket gives Summer through the television, including a hand forced through the screen, but I loved the subtler form of scary for this format. There’s one scene where Summer first watches the tape and the bird puppet on the show silently stares at her for an uncomfortable amount of time before returning to a song. The puppet designs are also a real visual draw for shifting from believable furry creations of a kids’ puppet show to slimy creatures with sharp teeth that resemble distant cousins of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Trauma becomes a central topic, ranging from Summer being haunted by her late husband to Crocket’s motivations for attacking bad parents, but it never feels as fully explored or exploited. I liked the idea of Crocket viewing himself as some rescuer of kids and his folly of placing them in perpetual adolescence, but it doesn’t have room to breathe until the final act. Posing Summer as a boiling-point single mother was a great staging, but her one-liner climax reduces her obvious moral path. The film favors more of the ride than the deeper questions of its surface-level topics, but I can’t blame the movie for dabbling in more clever ideas and stagings for Crocket’s TV set of horror. I particularly loved the twist of one adult trying to return to Crocket’s world, only to be denied and slaughtered for having grown up and losing his childhood innocence.

Mr. Crocket is compellingly creepy for the atmosphere alone, but has just enough going on beyond its 90s glaze of VHS horror. Those expecting a fucked-up juxtaposition of late-20th-century childhood tech, ala Five Nights at Freddy’s, won’t be disappointed. Demonic puppets take brutal bites out of the necks of parents. A sinister TV host finds ways to kill parents with bubbles. There’s even a clever dose of absurd faith in how the film tries to find some logic to Crocket’s powers, including a way to connect with him through TV signals. More importantly, there’s just enough time spent with Summer’s chaotic family situation and Crocket’s believable whimsy to care about this scenario rather than being a series of Crocket’s imaginative murders. It’s a solid film about trauma and TV obsession, where’s there’s a little more going on beyond the terror in the tape.