Share |  Eugene Weekly : Movies : 10.21.10   Urban Legends, or
Not  by Molly Templeton  To the credit of directors Joshua Zeman
and Barbara Brancaccio, low-budget production values and a heavy
reliance on stock footage don’t keep the strange documentary
Cropsey from being a fascinating look at the place where urban
legend and human horror meet and blend. Growing up on Staten
Island, N.Y., the directors, like the island’s other kids, heard
and told stories about Cropsey, a mythical escaped mental
patient who had a hook for a hand, or maybe killed people with
an axe — either way, he was out there in the imagination of the
residents. (A great sequence shows different island kids, now
grown, telling the Cropsey variations they heard.) There was
good reason for the stories: Staten Island was home to
Willowbrook Mental Institution, the subject of a horrifying
1970s expose by Geraldo Rivera that showed the terrible
treatment of its patients. The remnants of the institution —
shuttered buildings, lunchroom trays in t