Mr. Crocket, on Hulu
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Caution: potential spoilers.

This 2024 film is based on a 2022 short film that appeared in season 3 of Bite Size Halloween.

It begins in 1993, with a young boy watching a tape of a children's show called "Mr. Crocket's World". His stepfather gets angry and abusive, and then Mr. Crocket crawls out of the VCR to torture and kill the man.

In 1994, another man has recently died of some illness, and his wife, Summer, and son, Major, go to his funeral. Major seems disinterested, and just wants to play his video game. After the funeral, he goes outside and an unhoused woman named Rhonda (the mother from the opening scene) tries to abduct him, but Summer stops her. Later that night, Major has a nightmare and wakes up wanting his father. Summer gives him a whistle to blow whenever he needs her, and promises to always be there for him. But the next day (or days, I'm not sure how long), Major blows the whistle constantly just for fun, and in many ways behaves like a total brat. He eventually gets on Summer's last nerve, and she yells at him, saying she wants to quit being his mother. Then she goes outside and finds a little library box has appeared, and she takes a tape of Mr. Crocket's World from it, and gives it to Major. He never wants to stop watching it, which also gets irritating for Summer. (Actually, I feel like I may be getting some details out of order. I'm not sure.) Anyway, later that night the TV comes on by itself and starts playing the show. Summer tries several times to turn it off, and eventually smashes the TV on the floor. Mr. Crocket crawls out of it, and takes Major away through a doorway he draws with a magic marker.

The police blame Summer for Major "running away", but she begins canvassing the neighborhood asking if anyone has seen him, and puts up missing child posters. She also does research into Mr. Crocket, and learns he was a children's show host who was killed in 1979. Eventually she meets a man named Eddie, who tells her his own daughter had been taken by Mr. Crocket, so they begin working together. She tells him about Rhonda, and he finds out where she lives, so they go to talk to her. Her own son, Darren, had been taken by Mr. Crocket, and she has a way to find Crocket, or at least find where his next victim will be. And... I don't really want to go into too many more details of the plot. There is a major twist involving Eddie that didn't exactly surprise me, but it's more interesting than I expected it to be. And Summer has to try to convince Major to come back with her instead of staying with Mr. Crocket, which is rather difficult. And, yeah, I guess that's all I want to say.

I liked the movie more than I expected to. In fact, I wasn't planning on watching it at all, but I eventually changed my mind. Mr. Crocket's motivation was more interesting than I would have expected, though obviously he goes much too far, killing parents and abducting and basically hypnotizing children. In a lot of ways he seems like a goofy character, but he can also be quite menacing, obviously. And he has monstrous puppets helping him. And the movie does a good job showing Summer's desperation to get Major back, and her remorse at how she'd acted (even though I really couldn't blame her for snapping at him). It's still not a really good movie, but I'm not sorry I watched it.