Cropsey

Everyone has heard the urban legend of the killer who grabs kids from the streets and from their neighborhoods and takes them away. He chops them up and buries them, sometimes with a hook for a hand, sometimes a blunt and bloody ax. This is where that legend originated.

Two filmmakers, both of which grew up on Stanton Island, and who both grew up with this story come together and try and piece together the truth. We start out with a quick history of the island, and how it was a dumping ground for the rest of NYC. After hearing peoples interpretation of the story from those who live on the island we move on to the actual story of the missing children on Stanton Island. The disappearance and ultimate discovery of the body of a young girl with down syndrome is the spark that ignites the fire which illuminates the other disappearances that had been happening, but some how kept quiet for a decade.

The introduction of the center of the island brings a big piece of the puzzle together. In the center of the island is a large wooded area, the only one left on the island since it had been suburbanized. Two groups used this land, one was a hospital for those with deadly infectious diseases, mainly tuberculosis, and the other was a mental institution known as Willowbrook. Seeing footage of how the mental institution was run, and how its "patients" were treated we get a very good idea of the horrors that must have went on there. Children who were mentally and physically challenged left in their own filth, sometimes naked, or bound so they couldn't move, all of this exposed by Geraldo (believe it or not) Even after this terrifying expose, the hospital continued to run for another decade before it was finally shut down.

People started to live in the abandoned building, many ex-patients, which brings us to Andre Rand, the man arrested and convicted with the abductions and murders. At this point in the film it quickly became like many others I've seen, the story of a wrongfully accused man being incarcerated and how the train was rolled against them. They never push the idea hard that he's innocent, but they certainly hint at it a lot, (Odds are he's guilty) but there are and were so many problems with the prosecutions case, so many holes and strange occurrences that he should never have been found guilty. With there being so much inconclusive evidence and conflicting statements its a shame to see someone lynched out of social justice, even if he is guilty.

The interviews in it aren't great in terms of ascetics, in content they were great. There was little lighting, the camera was either to close, or two far, and made people look not as nice as they might otherwise have looked. The backgrounds were distracting and to busy. The story twists and turns at the beginning, and I was glad to see that, in the second half when it turned into the "mind of a killer" thing, mixed with the "Trial gone crazy" I started to tire of it a little.

Its a very interesting story, and they did a great job with it, there weren't to many points that I felt they went off topic, or took unnecessary tangents to explain anything. The whole idea of urban legends is that they arise questions instead of answer, and this movie is like that, at the end I have more questions than when I went it. Having just finished reading "Devil in the White City" which has a very unique Chicago serial killer, it was interesting to see this uniquely NY serial killer, and even more specific Stanton Island killer. I give it 8/10 stars.

Directors: Barbara Brancaccio, Joshua Zeman