This post was last modified: Oct 24, 2021 at 3:47 AM by Fun With Despair.

Alright, fuck me I guess. This is how this is gonna go, isn't it? I'll just save everyone the trouble and repeat my usual catchphrase for a movie of this caliber.

What a PIECE OF SHIT.

Good god this movie. I don't know what moron decided that any part of this film was a good idea, but I wish I could line them up next to the bonehead behind Daphne & Velma on the firing wall. I think this movie is slightly less cringe than that one, and overall it's definitely more of a... somewhat thought out mystery story in comparison, with more consistent internal logic, but jesus christ this one's embarrassing for entirely different reasons.

Whatever shit you could fling at Daphne & Velma, at least the cast in that one by and large did look like modern day highschoolers, or at least college kids. The casting in THIS one meanwhile is just god awful besides, as usual, Velma, who tends to get consistently "alright" casting. This isn't just a case of me looking at the James Gunn cast through a nostalgia lens and comparing everyone against them either, the casting here is BAD. Everyone looks like they're late 20s at best, even though some of them are actually the ages their characters are. Daphne in particular blows my mind because she was born in '92, this movie came out in 2008, and somehow she STILL looks 40 years old.

I think the real problem is the makeup and character design in general. She's always dressed like she's pregnant despite not being so, and Fred especially has been done dirty, looking more like Jacob from Twilight than the character he's supposed to be. This is also yet another movie about how the gang met, similarly to the first chunk of Scoob! but somehow even... worse? No actually that's being generous, this is a MUCH worse movie than that one.

Shaggy in this film is a total loser, and not in the usual sense that one might call Shaggy a loser. This Shaggy is a pathetic wretch of a man, the kind of awkward and embarrassing "weird kid" that you actively want to avoid at all costs. He's also, much like in Scoob!, doing a bad Matthew Lillard impression the entire time, but it's much worse here because you have to watch a guy do it in real time. He bumbles around and gets harassed on the school bus a bit by this generic looking bully guy who is basically just the fatter of the two Power Rangers bullies transplanted into this film.

But enough about Shaggy. Now let's take a look at Scooby, the abomination that he is.

This is our film's Scooby-Doo, a horrible beast that looks worse than the 2002 version. He's awful, he stands out like a sore thumb and this Shaggy doesn't have even a third of Lillard's skills when it comes to acting with a CGI actor. Here, he's an animal at this... traveling pet shop? No one wants to buy him and he's sad about it, until one girl convinces her dad to buy him. He jumps up and licks the dad's face, a typical dog move, and the dad instantly changes his mind and Scoob's back to square one. The pet salesman packs him up in a tiny cage and tosses him in the back of his truck before driving away. Predictably, Scooby's cage falls off the back and he is unleashed upon this poor town. He wanders around, running into a graveyard at night where he sees...

Oh god, these are the worst looking ghosts I have ever seen. They move like awful green screen effects, and these motherfuckers make the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion look good. They look worse than some shit from the Spongebob specials with Patchy the Pirate. They're also a major part of the movie and you have to deal with these horrible special effects constantly. I'm not gonna pretend Gunn's monsters in the first live action Scooby-Doo look great or anything, but it was 2002 and they were monsters, not ghosts. These fucking things look like Ghostbusters 2 rejects!

They chase Scooby out of the graveyard, and he runs into Shaggy's basement suite window, where after a shockingly sparse amount of dialogue where Scooby tells him about the ghosts, they become bros and Scooby now belongs to Shaggy. We don't see Shaggy asking his parents at all, and Shaggy's parents are handwaved entirely in this movie by saying that they work all the time. We get one shot ever of them, and it's a Charlie Brown-esque thing where you never see their faces, only like their legs. But why? This movie HAS adults! They're not even in this movie infrequently! The two primary adult characters though are the Principal of their school, whose name I forget, and Vice Principal Grimes, who I remember because he's played by Gary Chalk, who voices both Optimus Prime in Beast Wars and Grounder from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, both of which I would rather be watching.

The Principal is this pushover chump who loves collecting rare stamps. You meet him earlier in the movie, but he doesn't do that much. He just chats with Shaggy a bit, being the one person in this film who likes him. Vice Principal Grimes is just a cunt. I like him the most in this movie, because he can actually act and he is completely merciless towards the gang. He's such a total douche it's pretty funny at points. Anyway, these two mostly come into play when Shaggy, completely devoid of friends or people who can tolerate him at all, dresses Scooby up like a guy and tries to sneak him on the bus. This is where you meet the rest of the gang, as Scooby and the school bully guy cause a ruckus involving the four and get them all sent to detention by Grimes (against the protests of the Principal) except the bully despite him starting the entire conflict. Sounds like highschool alright.

While in detention, they have some kind of breakfast club shit going on where they realize that they all like mystery fiction except Shaggy who is continually useless, weird, and uncomfortable. This part is tropey as fuck, and besides maybe Velma, the gang is awful as I said earlier. It's not even that they're bad actors really, but they have no chemistry and everything feels forced. Thank god Scooby gets chained outside during this part so I don't have to look at him.

Eventually the shitty ghosts show up and chase them to the gym, where a pep rally assembly thing is going on. The ghosts fly around and do... ghost shit, and a third figure appears in a burst of smoke. This guy is... very obviously a man in a mask, referring to himself as "The Spectre". Despite being an obvious masked dude though, everyone treats him like he's a real ghost just like the other two for entirely too long. He acts a lot like the masked man in Monsters Unleashed, but with none of the dramatic flair. He seems to just want people to fuck off out of the school, and he doesn't even yell "MYSTERY INCORPOOOORATED!" when he addresses the gang, because he doesn't have any personal beef with them like the other masked man, and the gang isn't really... a gang yet.

Despite the presence of real ghosts, Grimes suspends the gang, believing them to be behind it somehow. The Principal himself meanwhile seems to be scared shitless and wants to close the school down. In order to clear their names, the gang decides to break into the fucking school at night, thinking they will find key evidence. They do find a mask matching the bad guy in the drama department, but they ALSO get chased around by the ghosts in a boring tedious sequence that goes on too long. Thankfully, Shaggy and Scooby get locked in the freezer, and die horrib- no never mind, Grimes finds them in the morning and the gang gets expelled for breaking in.

These motherfuckers REALLY don't give up though, so they dress up in shitty disguises and break in AGAIN, this time during the day. Well, most of them do anyway. Shaggy and Scooby continue to be worthless and just loiter outside dressed as garbage cans. Fred, Daphne and Velma meanwhile manage to get in and they learn that Grimes checked out a book on how to summon ghosts, which for some reason their high school library actively... has? This seems like... pretty solid evidence, so they decide to make the best choice of their life: breaking into the vice principal's fucking house.

Because the rest of the gang is too young to drive apparently, Shaggy reveals that he was held back in school and therefore has his license. This movie really hates Shaggy, doesn't it? Why not give Fred his license? They all look like they've been out of highschool for like 5 years at least anyway, and Fred USUALLY drives. The truth is that Shaggy has fuck all else he can do so they gave him this role instead.

They take Daphne's Parents' old green van up to Grimes' house and find his door wide open. They walk in, claiming its not illegal if the door is open, and begin looking around. Shaggy finds a gas mask and... sigh... tests it out by having Scooby fart while he wears it. The rest of the gang finds documents saying that their school was built on an old school that got buried by a natural disaster, and that a valuable time capsule is hidden down there. They deduce that Grimes must be behind this, but The Specter shows up with his shitty ghosts and reveals that he's captured Grimes and is in fact, not him.

...But why would he do this? He gains nothing by kidnapping the Vice Principal, why not let him take the fall for your scheme? Who gives a shit I guess, not this movie that's for sure. He manages to capture Scooby and he forces the gang back to the school with him to go find his time capsule. They descend into the spooky underground school, uncover the time capsule, run around a bunch, seal away the ghosts with the book on how to summon them, and then Scooby escapes and kicks the Specter's ass.

The gang unmasks the Specter to reveal him as... The Principal, who wanted to close the school so he could look for the time capsule because it contained some rare stamps he wanted. Why did he need to do this? He was the principal! He's literally in charge of the school! He can just go down there himself and look for it, he doesn't need to chase people off with ghosts, he's at the top of the fucking pecking order!

Whatever. Grimes forgives the gang and becomes the actual principal, and the evil principal gets sent to jail. There's the movie.

This movie, man. This movie. Even discarding the rest of this crap, the simple fact is that you can't start a Scooby origin story with real ghosts. It just doesn't work, ruins the entire premise of the show, and fucks over all the movies that have monsters being real as a big shock point. That's the least of this movie's problems though. It looks like shit, nearly every performance either doesn't care or is flat out bad, the effects are simply god awful, and it really does Shaggy dirty, making him a weirdo loser creep with zero redeeming qualities.

What a downgrade from the other live action Scoobs. I didn't have any hopes for this one and I was still disappointed. It's not... as bad as Daphne & Velma, but that's not by this movie's merit, that movie is just that bad. This made me wish I was watching literally any other movie on this list so far, and yes that includes Curse of the Speed Demon, which ALSO sucks.

Originally I wanted to give this another 1/10, but honestly that would still somehow be too much of a compliment to Daphne & Velma. At least this movie has the whole gang, and at least it's just the regular brand of unfunny rather than an entire movie based around old boomers trying to appeal to modern teenagers. Instead, this movie simply aim to appeal to no one, which is slightly more honorable.

I guess I'll give this a...

2/10

Ranking:
#1 - Scooby Doo on Zombie Island - 10/10
#2 - Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost - 9/10
#3 - Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - 8/10
#4 - Scooby Doo: Abracadabra-Doo - 7.5/10
#5 - Scooby Doo: Stage Fright - 5.5/10
#6 - Scooby Doo: Shaggy's Showdown - 5/10
#7 - Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico - 4.5/10
#8 - Scoob! - 4/10
#9 - Scooby Doo and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon - 3/10
#10 - Scooby-Doo: The Mystery Begins - 2/10
#11 - Daphne & Velma - 1/10

ok i like the red herring of the clearly evil vice principal but
that motivation makes absolutely no sense for the REAL ACTUAL PRINCIPAL even if you swapped the roles or something it would make slightly more sense

i cant get over that fred lmao

velmas cute tho