THE CROPSEY INCIDENT is a found footage movie which follows four misguided do-gooders into the woods where they search for the eponymous child kidnapper and killer.
Cropsey is a real-life urban legend based in the New York and New Jersey area, and evidently his story has been used to scare the bejesus out of kids around bonfires in Summer camp. It is even the basis for the halfway decent 80s slasher flick THE BURNING (1981).
Anyway, this film is clearly meant as satire; it has characters which are way over the top and features many absurd moments to make a point. Unfortunately, it misses practically on every count.
Most importantly, what this satire criticizes does not ring true because it tries to eat its cake and have it, too.
Here is concrete example: the main character is the leader of the group of progressive zealots. She does not care one whit for truth, and goes even to the length of making the victim of an unrelated attack say things to the camera to further convince the audience of her cause. So far, so good: this is end-justifies-the means reasoning that characterizes many an ideological zealot.
But then, the movie turns around and shows her in later scenes dreaming of becoming an actress and having her own perfume line, the ultimate symbol of capitalist luxury. So the zealotry was all fake, and in reality she is just another vapid social media personality.
The problem is that in real life, there is no real overlap between these two groups, and that is actually for a good reason. If someone was as vapid as the protagonist turns out to be, then they would not have had the capacity to impersonate a convinced ideologue because being that takes hard work of the kind that vapid social media types generally avoid. However far off the truth, an ideological zealot makes a massive effort to be informed (or misinformed) about their pet issue, usually a societal ill that affects some disadvantaged segment. A vapid influencer type would be too self-centered to bother finding out about those things beyond the most superficial layer
So, in the end, this is just dumb, lazy critique of progressive zealots. Satire that makes fun of them has been around for a long time, for example BANANAS (1971) by Woody Allen, which I consider one of his lesser works but still immeasurably better than this hodgepodge. One movie about murderous progressive liberal do-gooders which is not only well-made and funny but actually succeeds as satire is THE LAST SUPPER (1995), which does basically everything right that this film fails at. Also, a thematically similar found footage movie about film-makers trying to expose a legend related to child abuse which actually shows how to break new ground in the genre is WEKUFE (2016).
The general laziness or perhaps incompetence extends to other aspects of this movie: the story is half-baked; the pace is off; the acting is bad, the dialogue amateurish and many gags miss.
Also, even though this is supposed to be found footage, the director apparently abandons it later in the movie in favor of many shots that could not have been shot by any in-movie camera.
About halfway through, I predicted how this movie was going to end, and only hung in there to check. Turns out, I was right. The idea for the ironic ending, that if we go to sufficient extreme, we become what we hate, was actually not bad but was severely undermined by the failure to make a proper satire. In particular, if the leader of the group was really just a vapid influencer, her hate for cropsey-even as an idea- would not have been genuine, so the irony falls flat.
