With a title like this, I really expected Where's My Mummy to be another annoying, boring What's New era movie, and while it... kind of is, it's also batshit insane and I think I'm there for it. This one isn't anything special, but it was relatively entertaining just because of the strange places it went, and it had a couple interesting plot twists that I thought were pretty good.

Much like Monster of Mexico, this is another "the gang goes to a foreign place" movie, but this one's much better than that one was. For one, a lot less time is spent on tourist stuff and just wandering the countryside. The story this time is that Velma's been working in Egypt with archaeologists to excavate and restore a tomb discovered under the Sphinx. Mystery Inc. decides to go visit her as a surprise, and that's what kicks off the movie.

Much like Monster of Mexico, this one's still dragging around the corpses of the 70s cast, and Shaggy sounds like he's basically on his deathbed. He doesn't do that much in this movie though, mostly serving as Scooby's sidekick to the point of appending "...and Shaggy too!" after every time Scooby says his own catchphrase. I'm not sure if this is something he used to do in the old cartoons that I'm just forgetting about, but its sort of awkward, much like their roles in this movie in general. While the rest of Mystery Inc. engages with the mystery, Shaggy and Scooby go on a sidequest that gets increasingly deranged. You'll see.

The gang drives through the desert dunes, on their way to visit Velma, when the van breaks down. After Shaggy and Scooby hallucinate in the desert for a bit, they are rescued by a Cool Egyptian Guy (who I will refer to as that entirely because he has a long name I forget) and towed to town via a camel. Along the way they meet this Ghost Adventures motherfucker who wants to find proof of the supernatural. He's alright, a very "2000s" character who was probably supposed to be unironically cool back then but now just comes off as kind of funny. They also all discover that apparently the Nile River has dried up, which seems like it would seriously cause more of a stink than it does in this movie.

When they finally arrive at the dig site, Velma is surprised to see them, but introduces them to the guy she is working with, an Egyptian royal named Prince Omar, who is also an archaeologist. Real jack of all trades, this guy, but it's kind of interesting to see a movie in the early 2000s with a middle eastern character who is just a guy and not a stereotype.

The gang goes check out the ruins below the Sphinx, but suddenly a team of tomb raiders run by the evil "Dr. Amelia Von Butch", who I'm just going to refer to as Evil Lara Croft because that's what she is. She doesn't much care about history or preservation, preferring to blow shit up and steal artifacts for profit. She rushes into the tomb with her goons, and the gang follows, only to find the entrance blocked by a big stone slab that says it'll curse whoever opens the tomb, with symptoms ranging from "turns people to stone" to "dries up the Nile River". Hell of a curse.

Not caring, Evil Lara Croft blows up the slab anyway, and just as she does, a sandstom rages outside. The gang runs out to have a look, leaving Prince Omar in the tomb, and when they return, Prince Omar has been seemingly turned to stone. This is a weird trend with regards to Scooby Doo and mummies. Even back in the 70s, mummies always "turned you to stone", and I never really got why. In an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, the mummy kidnapped people and replaced them with statues made of quick-drying cement, which seems impractical, but whatever. I guess it's because there's no obvious thing a mummy does to you when it catches you. A zombie, werewolf, etc. just attack and kill you, but I guess a mummy is inherently a bit more "eldritch" than those just by virtue of being linked to weird Egypt lore. Oh well.

The gang freaks out because Prince Omar is turned to stone, but Evil Lara Croft doesn't care and ventures into the tomb. Mystery Inc. follows her so she doesn't cause trouble. They end up running into Ghost Adventures Guy and a bunch of reanimated mummies, who chase them all around the tomb to the tune of shitty jazz. This movie's entire soundtrack is just vaguely crap jazz actually. Anyway, Velma gets turned to stone in the midst of this, adding an actual level of stakes to this one for once. After the gang has their sad moment over Velma, they run into Cleopatra's ghost, the ruler and commander of the mummies, and Shaggy and Scooby fall down a hole.

We're going to step away from the gang for a bit because the contents of this hole are fucking insane. You're not ready for how deranged this one gets, unless you've seen it before.

Shaggy and Scooby end up in a strange lost city, populated by a bunch of white tech nerds who have "forsaken their own culture to live like the Pharaohs of old". They are led by this High Priest dude, and they begin worshipping Scooby as the reincarnation of their god "Ascoobis". They begin to pamper and spoil the duo, until the High Priest forces them to face their destiny as sacrifices and throws them into an arena with a giant robot scorpion. Meanwhile the gang meets back up in town with Cool Egyptian Guy and they hunt down Shaggy and Scooby to the lost city, where the giant robot scorpion falls into the river running through the city and Cool Egyptian Guy reveals himself to be with the police and arrests the High Priest for damming the Nile River to run water through his city, revealing the High Priest to have been a "brilliant criminal civil engineer" this whole time.

Where did this "Ascoobis" shit come from? The Cool Egyptian guy simply declares that it was fate, and drags away the civil engineer. None of this gets an explanation. Where did the giant robot scorpion come from? Hell if this movie knows. Up until this point, the movie was pretty standard "Scooby Goes to Egypt" fare, but it flies off the rails at this point completely inexplicably. The only real thing that even comes of this plotline is that the gang for some reason comes to the conclusion that the curse must be bullshit because THIS GUY was the reason the Nile was drained.

They all head back to the tomb, and as Mystery Inc. (minus Velma) storm Cleopatra and her mummies with their own army comprised of the tech bros as Evil Lara Croft and her team get overwhelmed and kidnapped. She escapes though, and ends up triggering a trap in the treasure room that floods the tomb with the waters of the Nile, washing everyone away and dumping the treasure into the river. The gang unmasks Cleopatra, and it turns out to be... Velma. Yeah this one's got a bit of a plot twist. She explains that her and the rest of the research team fabricated the curse in order to scare away tomb raiders like Evil Lara Croft. Two of the mummies turns out to be Prince Omar and Ghost Adventures Guy too. They faked turning to stone with concrete statues they had prefabricated in order to really sell it, and didn't tell the gang because Velma didn't want one of them to get fucking shot or something due to her stupid plan.

Evil Lara Croft and her gang are arrested for destruction of a historical site, and everyone lives happily ever after, I assume.

This movie is... not really what you'd expect. It has mummies, but they're only in it like twice and a third of the movie is taken up by this completely insane Ascoobis plotline. Even though it's nonsense however, I can't entirely complain because for once, this movie isn't boring. Even if what's happening is completely insane, at least something is happening in this one. It's got a lot going on, with three antagonists and a decent plot twist, and while again, the civil engineer insanity plotline is mostly filler, its at least more amusing in its absurdity than the filler in say, Monster of Mexico, and the High Priest guy is a better secondary antagonist than Paco the Mystical Talking Eagle by a landslide for entirely that reason.

Do not get me wrong, this is nowhere near a remotely good movie. The animation still looks like a TV episode, the entire soundtrack is pretty bad, the older voice actors (besides Frank Welker's consistently solid Fred) all sound horribly aged, and frankly not even this movie seems to know where my mummy is, considering they barely show up. But it's at least more watchable than a big chunk of the movies so far. I think the plot twist at the end is neat and unique for the series, and it manages to harness its psychosis to some effect without dipping too far into cringe or groanworthy stupidity.

Its fine, better than the average I'd say. It's a pretty simple...

6/10

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: Where's My Mummy? - 6/10
#6 - Scooby Doo: Stage Fright - 5.5/10
#7 - Scooby Doo: Shaggy's Showdown - 5/10
#8 - Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico - 4.5/10
#9 - Scoob! - 4/10
#10 - Scooby Doo and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon - 3/10
#11 - Scooby-Doo: The Mystery Begins - 2/10
#12 - Daphne & Velma - 1/10

wow, that IS a genuinely good twist with logical setup and payoff what the fuck

that ascoobis shit is hilarious. i love that. it makes no goddamn sense whatsoever but i doubt they meant it to. you've made me actually want to watch this one.

fucked up and stupid i love it