Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico is not a very exciting movie. It's essentially just an extremely bizarre episode of What's New Scooby Doo? drawn out over an hour and fifteen minutes, and you can probably guess what that's like to some extent. While this isn't the first movie of the What's New era, it's the first of this garrison, so I'll explain. What's New Scooby-Doo? was the series' reboot in the 2000s after not having a proper, current, televised cartoon in decades.

The popularity of the 90's direct-to-video movies and the constantly-reran original show led to a bit of a Scooby renaissance in this era, and I almost guarantee you that nearly everyone in an English speaking country on this board has seen at least one episode of What's New Scooby-Doo? , if not this movie itself.

Unfortunately, this movie is aggressively mediocre, and I wish I would have kept my memories of it being much better than it actually is. Oh well.

The premise this time, as you may have guessed, is that the gang is in Mexico and there is a monster. The movie opens with Fred talking via e-mail (and I do mean talking, for some reason in this movie, characters visibly say what they are typing out loud whenever they use an e-mail service, with characters reacting to their speech in splitscreen views?) to his Mexican pen pal, some dude named Alejo who owns a hotel that's been passed down in his family for generations.

He invites Fred to go visit him and his family, and the gang heads down to Mexico, which is where the monster is. Speaking of, while they're traveling, the dreaded Chupacabra shows up and starts fucking up the hotel and the surrounding village at night. The Chupacabra, described by several characters in the movie as "Mexico's version of Bigfoot", was both written and designed by someone who has never even remotely heard of a Chupacabra before. A popular example of a cryptid, the Chupacabra is in that sense, sort of like a "Mexican Bigfoot", except that beyond that it bears no resemblance to Bigfoot, instead said to suck blood from goats and resemble a fucked up lizard or dog.

Indeed, the explanation behind most Chupacabra related urban legends seem to tie back to mangy coyotes or similar. Here though, the Chupacabra is a big purple monkey with eyeliner. He's not scary at all, and outside of a few people talking about him being scary, he tends to get treated more as an annoyance than anything. All he does is snarl and break shit, he's not a big deal. For a movie called "The Monster of Mexico", he's not even in it very much at all.

Anyway the gang arrives in Mexico, they have a quirky montage, and they go to the hotel and meet Alejo's family, namely his brother Luis and Luis' casually racist Texan wife Charlene who he met at a theme park in the U.S.A. called "Mr. Smiley's". Remember that, because there's big signs everywhere in this movie advertising some Mexican spinoff park that is about to be built. The rest of his family doesn't matter. There's a chihuahua too I guess, who is sort of a... love interest for Scooby? Don't expect to see like any of these characters again until the very end besides Alejo and his brother.

They go looking for the Chupacabra, Daphne interviews some kids, and Shaggy and Scooby sleep in the van. Someone sabotages the van so they have to walk everywhere and holy fuck is this movie boring. They wander around for what feels like forever with Alejo and his brother, eventually meeting this weird old Mexican dude who tells them that the Chupacabra isn't real because it's not part of the Mexico Lore™ apparently, before shilling for his website "www.ancientmexicanwisdom.com". I am not kidding. Luis becomes sus because he fakes a KO like one of mfan's shitty KG plans.

The gang goes to this history museum for no other reason than the fact that they need a setpiece, Daphne gets kidnapped by a shady tour guide lady because they needed a setpiece, they go through a weird cave slide thing because they needed a setpiece, they're attacked by animatronics because they needed a setpiece and... yeah this entire movie is pretty much random excuses for the gang to do shit in Mexico.

There is little rhyme or reason to any of it, and the only standout is my favorite character in the movie, a janky, racist animatronic named "Paco the Mystical Talking Eagle", who manages to convince everyone at the ruins SOMEHOW that the gang has desecrated the ruins and angered the aztec gods (?). Again, none of this makes any sense, it's all junk. Paco just amuses me because he is a walking stereotype that would make Speedy Gonzales blush. There is a reason he is like this though, namely that the villains of the movie are Americans and don't really like Mexican culture.

Yeah, this movie does have villains. Remember the Chupacabra? The movie sure doesn't.

Eventually the gang goes back to the hotel and meets back up with their Mexican friends for the Day of the Dead celebrations. Suddenly there's a ghost now too, that tries to get Alejo to sell his land, claiming to be his dead grandfather and telling him that the Chupacabra is tied to a curse on his land. The ghost turns out to be a projection controlled by this dude in a... skeleton bodysuit? Then the Chupacabra attacks and gets owned immediately. The skeleton guy is unmasked as the guy who owns the Mr. Smiley theme parks, and the Chupacabra is unmasked as the tour guide who kidnapped Daphne, who is then unmasked as Luis' wife.

Apparently their plan was to get Alejo to sell the land so they could develop on it, as the wife worked for the theme park in secret and was only dating Luis to one day get the land in case Alejo didn't sell. She's also cucking him with the theme park guy, making Luis the most tragic character in the franchise thus far. The end.

Yeah this one sucks. It's better than WWE still, but barely. Everyone almost certainly remembers it being better than it was because they were kids, but this movie is boring, ugly and doesn't have much of a reason to exist beyond an excuse to have the gang go somewhere else, a trend that is reflected in all the movies in this era. However, one of the movies from this era has pirates and the other has the Hex Girls, so this one is probably the worst. Still, I find it hard to really rag on this movie too hard as its clearly meant for little kids as a departure from the darker and more legitimately frightening 90's films.

It's fine for that purpose. If you have a little kid, slap them down in front of this movie and it'll probably entertain them. Please for your child's sake though, stop posting on Minus World first.

Before I close it off though, there's one other thing I have to mention. This is the last movie that has the entire original 70s voice cast, and uh... you can tell. Daphne in particular sounds very old at times and it's very distracting. Everyone's line reading is also sort of stilted, much like the old cartoon. Compared to 2010's Abracadabra-doo and Stage Fright, Monster of Mexico was a disappointment, just barely edging out Scoob! because at least no one dabbed. I'm giving this one a...

4.5/10

Ranking:
#1 - Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - 8/10
#2 - Scooby Doo: Abracadabra-Doo - 7.5/10
#3 - Scooby Doo: Stage Fright - 5.5/10
#4 - Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico - 4.5/10
#5 - Scoob! - 4/10
#6 - Scooby Doo and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon - 3/10

if the villains are americans who hate mexico doesnt that make the chupacabra not fitting secretly good writing

woah........................................................

This post was last modified: Oct 12, 2021 at 7:49 PM by Fun With Despair.

if the villains are americans who hate mexico doesnt that make the chupacabra not fitting secretly good writing

woah........................................................

You'd think, but the Mexican characters are the ones who identify it as a Chupacabra in the first place

Bonus fact this was the final movie voiced by the original scooby doo cast

Bonus fact this was the final movie voiced by the original scooby doo cast

I mentioned that in the review. They all sound like crap though.

oh right at the very end rip