IT'S THANKSGIVING DAY . . . .AND WHAT BETTER WAY TO CELEBRATE THAN BY WATCHING A HALLOWEEN SCOOBY-DOO MOVIE!
Yeah, that's how I do. The new Scooby-Doo feature film will now become a yearly Halloween rewatch because (spoiler alert!) it's wonderful. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this one. It's true, as many people have already said, that's it's the Scooby-Doo Mad Max movie or, as I prefer to say, Scooby-Doo in the WACKY RACES! At least half of the entire film takes place while our heroes are being chased by our monsters down a seemingly endless highway. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The gang of Mystery Incorporated are at a Halloween parade headed by none other than Elvira, Mistress of the Dark when a creepy Jack O'Lantern-noggined Scarecrow attacks with his flying pumpkins.
The ever-intelligent Velma surmises that the flying pumpkins are in fact just drones and uses a phone app (provided by Freddie) to short-circuit them. The scarecrow villain is unmasked and revealed to be . . . . the Scarecrow! Yeah, the Batman villain from Gotham City (really cool, that!) and Dr. Crane is carted off in an armoured police van. As Shaggy and Scooby wander off for a little trick-or-treating, they discover a leaking toxic waste truck next to a pumpkin patch which turns the gourds into flying jack o'lantern monsters! At the same time, the poor Mystery Machine (which was totalled in the previous scarecrow attack) is towed away and is replaced by a new state-of-the-art Mystery Machine X by none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy.
From here, the giant Jack O'Lantern Monster and it's flying pumpkin toothy minions attack and the gang has to team up with a local guy named Mike and his young daughter, Elvira, Bill Nye . . . .and they even at one point have to bust out The Scarecrow to help them!!!
At the start of the film, when I saw Elvira, I thought this would be another example of a "guest star" who is dropped into the film for 5 minutes as a cameo. But no. Thankfully, Elvira (and Bill Nye) are integral parts of the plot and are in the entire film; Bill Nye as a hologram in the souped-up Mystery Machine X -- the script even makes a KNIGHT RIDER jokes about it referring to him as "The Nye Rider". I appreciated how these guest stars were totally integrated into the plot and didn't show up as a gratuitous cameo. The lengthy road chase is actually exciting and has so much going on in it that it never drags. There are also plenty of good laughs. There is also a LOT of pumpkin carnage going on; sure, it's only pumpkin guts but it scores high on the bloog & gore-o-meter while you're watching. Matthew Lillard is back voicing Shaggy and here he sounds really old for some reason -- similar to how Casey Kasem sounded in his latter days. Get some rest, Matthew; you sound tired. But other than Lillard's occasionally wheezy voice, he's still the perfect Shaggy. Frank Welker (who actually IS kinda old) sounds bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as Freddie. Also appearing as Mike is Bumper Robinson who portrayed Victor "Cyborg" Stone in the DC animated movie JUSTICE LEAGUE: DOOM. This is one action-packed Scooby movie that I'll be rewatching every Halloween for sure! I had a blast!
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