Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map (2013) - Review

With Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map we get another Scooby-Doo mystery involving ghost pirates – having most recently tackled the ghost of Captain Skunkbeard in Scooby-Doo! Pirates Ahoy! – but this particular stands out from all their other adventures, be thee nautical in nature or other, by being the first time we get the Scooby gang in puppet form.

With character designs based on the series A Pup Named Scooby-Doo this adventure takes place when the Scooby gang were elementary school-aged while also taking some of that show’s a wackier aspect that satirized the conventions of the show's previous incarnations, but Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map is also a bit more surreal in nature than any other incarnation of Scooby-Doo. In this movie, we find the Scooby gang living in a rather large treehouse – with an interior even larger than its exterior as if part Tardis – and things kick-off when the pizza Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) orders a pizza for him and Scooby-Doo turns out to include a treasure map inside one of the slices.

 

A pizza with an extra topping of mystery.

Velma (Stephanie D'Abruzzo) informs the gang that the map belonged to the notorious pirate Gnarlybeard (John Rhys-Davies). who had such a foul-smelling beard that it would often knock out his victims. This famed pirate was also known to have a maniacal sidekick named Ye Phantom Parrot (Dee Bradley Baker), a huge menacing parrot with a terrifying squawk. No sooner does Velma finish recounting this nautical nightmare then a giant parrot burst into the room and steals the treasure map.

 

“Swiper, no swiping.”

As mysteries go the one found in Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map if not one of the better ones is easily one of the more bizarre, due in no small part from the cast being weird-assed puppets, but there is an actual solid mystery holding it all together and Velma is actually given solid clues to uncover the identity of villain…or villains? The short forty-five-minute runtime doesn’t provide a lot of time for a plethora of suspects so the gang is stuck with just two. First, there is archeologist Dr. Escobar (Grey Griffin), who accuses the Scooby gang of trying to steal her "great" discovery, and then there is creepy Lighthouse Lou (Jeff Bennett) who is guilty of...uh…being creepy, I guess.

 

He is kind of terrifying.

Where Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map strays from the regular Scooby-Doo formula is that this movie is basically divided into two parts with the first part dealing with the Scooby gang capturing Ye Phantom Parrot, and discovering it to be Stu Stukowski the pizza delivery boy who is possibly the sixth great-grandkid of Gnarlybeard, and who dropped the treasure map in the pizza he'd delivered. But the mystery isn’t over yet, the gang continue to hunt for the treasure – again running afoul of Dr. Escobar and her assistant Shirley, who Fred (Frank Welker) thinks is cute and smells wonderful, much to Daphne’s (Grey Griffin) dismay – and before you know it Shaggy and Scooby are shanghaied by none other than Gnarlybeard himself.

Note: This movie is a clear tribute to Jim Henson’s Muppets and Gnarlybeard looks to be the bastard child of Sweetums and Animal.

This movie does go off into some rather bizarre tangents, like Daphne revealing that her rich father leaves airplanes all over the world just in case he may need one, but some of the humour sadly focuses on what an idiot Fred really is, with him repeating something Velma or Daphne had already stated as if he had figured it out all along, and then we have the reveal that Gnarlybeard is Dr. Escobar assistant Shirley, who happens to be Stu’s sister and also after her "rightful" inheritance. Then to make things even more bizarre we learn that Dr. Escobar’s “most important discovery” was just her old teddy bear that Lighthouse Lou had given to her on their first date.

 

Talk about a plush romance.

Having a puppet incarnation of Scooby-Doo and the gang was certainly a novel idea, and definitely better than The Happytime Murders which also tried a different take on The Muppets, but the execution of puppetry in this movie I found to be rather unnerving at times – what with their flapping mouths and dead eyes – so this particular format didn’t always work for me. On the other hand, I did enjoy some of the movie’s rather surreal elements.

• Fred’s mirrored reflection, while he works out, moves and talks independent of him.
• Daphne’s shoe collection appears to be sentient.
• The lighthouse stairwell briefly turns into an escalator with elevator muzak.
• Scooby Snacks have the ability to transform Scooby-Doo into a giant ball, to knock over stone bowling pins and eventually into an actual rocket.

Note: Scooby Snacks giving our canine hero strange powers could be a nod to the nano-tech formula from Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!

Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map will go down as one of the more peculiar entries in the history of Scooby-Doo, even more than the delightfully bizarre run of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo, and though the puppet medium didn’t quite work for me that doesn’t necessarily mean other viewers won't find this felt adventure to be right up their alley.

A View to a Kill (1985) – Review

The fourteenth Bond film opens with a pre-credit sequence of James Bond fleeing across a Siberian glacier to the music of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls” while using the front runner of a snowmobile as a snowboard, which pretty much sets the tone for this particular Bond film as director John Glenn was clearly stating that nothing that follows needs be taken seriously. This was also Roger Moore’s seventh and the final outing as the world’s greatest secret agent, with Moore later commenting, "I was only about four hundred years too old for the part."  Sadly, having a “long in the tooth” Bond was far from the only problem with A View to a Kill.

 So, what is James Bond up to this time?  Well, over the years Bond movie titles often had very little to do with the source material they are borrowed from, for example, the film The Living Daylights was taken from an Ian Fleming short of the same name, where Bond is sent to kill a KGB assassin to only at the last minute shoot the assassin’s gun instead when he realizes the killer is a woman – nice to see his sexism at play there – but that was only part of the pre-credit sequence for the film nothing that followed came from the works of Ian Flemming.  Now, in the case of A View to a Kill, the film has literally nothing to do with the short story “From a View to a Kill” which dealt with Bond investigating the murder of a motorcycle dispatch-rider and the theft of top-secret documents. The pre-credit sequence of this movie does have Bond (Roger Moore) recovering a microchip from a dead British agent, and I guess agent 003 could have been a courier, but he’s never mentioned again nor does Bond ever investigate his death, instead the microchip leads Bond to government contractor Zorin Industries, whose EMP shielded microchip should not have ended up in Russian hands.

Note: Bond escapes Siberia by way of a small sub disguised as an iceberg that Q-Branch had, for some reason, tricked out to double as a sex pad. I’m guessing James Bond had plenty of pull with the MI6 design team.

The plot of A View to a Kill – and I use the term “plot” loosely here – deals with billionaire Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) and his plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley, and if this diabolical scheme seems a tad familiar that’s because the Bond film Goldfinger had a very similar plot, where Goldfinger's villainous plan was to contaminate the Fort Knox gold reserve and thus make his own supply of gold worth that much more.  Of course, recycling plots is nothing new for Hollywood, it being biggest cannibalistic enterprise on the planet, but the scheme that Max Zorin proposes isn’t so much evil as it is ludicrous, impractical, and also wouldn’t work.

 

Almost as ludicrous as having this be your get-away vehicle.

Why Zorin's plan would fail:

• By the mid-80s Silicon Valley was not a center of manufacturing of semiconductors, most of the manufacturing was in Asia by this time, while Silicon Valley had moved to become the center for innovation and investment in the tech sector. Destroying it via earthquake would also destroy the companies that would be purchasing Zorin's microchips. That is not a good business model.
• With Bond and MI6 openly investigating Zorin Industries – Bond being the worst secret agent by tipping his hand and identity from the outset – so if Zorin’s planned destruction of Silicon Valley went forward Zorin's arrest and prosecution would be virtual certainties along with the seizure of all of his available assets. Once Zorin discovered the British government was investigating him his “Main Strike” plan should have been put on hold indefinitely.
• Even if Bond didn’t tip off the United States government to what Max Zorin was doing the detonations used to trigger the explosions in the mine would look far from natural, and being the mines involved were all owned by Zorin Industries, and that bullet-riddled Zorin employees would eventually surface, there is no way the authorities wouldn’t be able to trace the earthquake to Zorin.
• If, despite all this, Zorin went forward with his plan to drain the San Andreas Reservoir to flood Silicon Valley it still wouldn’t have worked, as the volume of water would have long dissipated and soaked into the ground along the more than 35-mile stretch to the Valley.
• Also, the idea that a bomb of any magnitude could create an earthquake affecting the San Andreas Fault is totally ludicrous. Zorin's bomb would have an infinitesimal, negligible effect on causing an earthquake in that zone. That’s just science.

Question: Is there a company that makes models and displays for supervillains?

Thus the plot of A View to a Kill hinges on villain’s plan that makes no sense financially, criminally or even scientifically, which, to be fair, is certainly no a deal-breaker when it comes to the fantasy world of James Bond, but it still comes across as rather lazy and trite screenwriting and not something you would have found in any of Ian Flemings books or short stories. When creating a Bond villain’s evil plan it’s important to construct a scheme that at least makes more sense than Lex Luthor’s plan to drop California into the ocean as part of a real estate scheme.

 

"I'm going to rename Silicone Valley Otisburg.

If we set aside the preposterous nature of Zorin’s diabolical plan we are still left with several other major issues with the movie, ranging from serious structural flaws with the script to the poorly written characters that populate it. After the exciting Beach Boys pre-credit sequences we find Bond and company travelling to the Ascot Racecourse to observe Max Zorin, whose horses have been winning despite their poor bloodlines, and this leads to James teaming up with Sir Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee), a racehorse trainer and MI6 agent who believes that Zorin has been using some form of undetectable designer steroid on his horses. And what does Zorin’s cheating at horse racing have to do with his plot to create a worldwide microchip monopoly, you ask? Absolutely nothing, that’s what. All this does is allow the filmmakers to take us on a magical tour of the historic Château de Chantilly, where a mad Duke built awesome stables because he believed he was going to be reincarnated as a donkey. This is a gorgeous location, and the history behind the place is fascinating, it just doesn’t have anything to do with destroying Silicon Valley. We spend way too much time here with Bond and Tibbett bumbling around looking for clues.  It’s only valid purpose is in the introduction of the latest Bond girl Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), the granddaughter of an oil tycoon whose company was taken over by Zorin.

 

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am old enough to be your grandfather.”

It was around this time that Roger Moore came to the realization that he was older than the mothers of the girls he was bedding in these films – which didn’t stop the writers from having Bond sleep with four women in this outing – but where A View to a Kill stands out amongst the other films in the series is in its pitting Bond against Max Zorin's lover and chief henchwoman May Day (Grace Jones). Now, this isn’t the first time Bond has faced off against a femme fatale, Pussy Galore being the more notable, but the marketing campaign focused heavily on the idea that “Has James Bond finally met his match?” yet at no point does James Bond and May Day ever fight. Was it because the studio was against men hitting women? Doubtful as they had no issue with Sean Connery beating the lesbianism out of Honor Blackman in Goldfinger. Could it have been the idea of 58-year-old Roger Moore fighting a 37-year-old Grace Jones being ridiculous? That seems a little more plausible, but we may never know what boardroom discussions led to the decision to skip having Bond duke it out with the main henchwoman.  Regardless, it did lead to Bond encountering her on a rather different playing field.

Trivia Note: Roger Moore has since revealed that while shooting their love scene Grace Jones surprised all by revealing she was wearing a black strap-on penis.

While Grace Jones shines as the beautiful and dangerous May Day we also cannot overlook the immensely fun performance by Christopher Walken as the psychopathic industrialist Max Zorin, the product of a Nazi genetic experiment. Walken chews up the scenery with relish – also with ketchup, mustard and probably a little sauerkraut – and he is simply a joy to watch as he mercilessly guns down his own men, laughing all the while, making him if not one of the better Bond villains easily one of the more entertaining ones. Maybe his plan to gain a monopoly in the microchip market was never going to work, his employees were just too terrified to point out the stupidity of his scheme.

Stray Thoughts:

• May Day’s barbed butterfly weapon of assassination, while getting points for creativity, doesn’t seem any more effective than a sniper rifle would have been.  It wasn’t a subtle attack, like poisoning the dude’s meal would have been, and she still had to flee the scene.
• Bond is aided by CIA agent Chuck Lee (David Yip), who is working undercover in San Francisco, but the CIA doesn’t tend to operate within the U.S. borders so Bond would most likely have gotten help from the FBI.
• Sir Godfrey Tibbett and Chuck Lee are booth garroted to death by May Day, her hiding in the backseat of their respective cars, but she never tries this technique against Bond. It just doesn’t pay to be friends with Bond, your life expectancy drops to about nil.
• Zorin tries to burn Bond and Stacey alive in an elevator and, for some reason, the fire causes the steel cables to snap as if they were made of yarn. Apparently, building codes are very different in San Francisco.
• Stacey is caught unawares by slow-moving blimp. *sigh* Worse is the fact that Zorin had no reason to grab her, fleeing the country immediately would have been his better option.
• We don’t get much in the way of Q gadgets in this movie but the remote-controlled surveillance device – which looks a bit like K9 from Doctor Who – is used to discover if Bond survived the mission. Q (Desmond Llewelyn) sends the device into Stacey’s house and discovers the two of them in the shower together.  Question: Is there some reason why Q didn’t just knock on the door to see if they were home?

 

Q, the original Dirty Old Man.

As bad and nonsensical as this film is there's still a certain amount of pleasure one gets out of watching Roger Moore charm his way in and out of tight spots – in out of various women less so – but fans of great stunts, fantastic locals, excellent John Barry scores, and amusing banter, will most likely find this to be a fun adventure. There are worse ways to spend one's time than taking A View to a Kill.

Scooby-Doo! Mecha Mutt Menace (2013) – Review

Scooby-Doo and the gang are no strangers to mechanical monsters; in fact, most of the villains they’ve encountered over the years have used robotics to create such terrors as abominable snowmen and rampaging dinosaurs, but with Scooby-Doo! Mecha Mutt Menace, the threat is a straight-up rogue robot… or is it actually rogue? Could someone be behind this motorized monstrosity’s mayhem?

This particular mystery finds Fred Jones (Frank Welker) entering one of his amazing traps at the Annual Science Expo in Houston, a contest the Scooby gang is sure he will win, as Velma (Mindy Cohn) comments, “You’re a shoo-in, who else has an elaborate project demonstrating how to use the laws of physics to capture a human being… or a human being posing a supernatural monster?” Unfortunately, a test of the device accidentally snags a cute passerby, landing her in the trap’s gum resin-coated net. This passerby turns out to be Melanie Staples (Lacey Chabert), daughter of NASA Scientist Ned Staples (Alan Rachins), who later will be demonstrating his latest project: a giant robot dog called "Mecha Mutt" designed to navigate the terrain of Mars. As the title of this short implies, this robot goes rogue, even going so far as to break Velma’s glasses and destroy Fred’s ascot, but the real threat to our group could come from the green-eyed monster of jealousy.

Note: Fred and Daphne’s declaration of love in Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright either was brushed under the rug or blithely ignored.

The mystery behind “Mecha Mutt” is pretty much background to Daphne’s jealousy and the resentment of this “threat” to her relationship with Fred, but while her simmering hatred of this intruder seems a tad much, sniping comments whenever she can, Fred’s bumbling attraction to this new girl isn’t much better. This following exchange basically sums up the drama of this adventure.

Melanie: “I don’t understand how this can be happening.”
Daphne: “Maybe someone has found a way to override Doctor Staples’ systems and is operating Mecha Mutt by remote control.”
Velma: “I agree.”
Daphne: “See, I’m just as smart as Melanie.”
Fred: “Trust me, Daphne, I’m not attracted to Melanie’s brain.”

 

Wow Fred, just like, wow.

Romantic entanglements aside, there is still a mystery to solve, and being this is one of their short films, the mystery aspect is rather thin, as is the suspect pool. First, we have Irv (Paul Reubens) who is angry that Dr. Staples has him working so hard that he doesn’t even have time to date and he also believes this is a plot of the Doctor to keep Melanie and him apart. Next, we have Dr. Devon Albright (Julie Bowen) who states that Dr. Staples stole her idea and took over the project simply because he was a famous astronaut and could bring in more funding. Doctor Albright clearly has the strongest and sanest motive, as well as the techno-know-how to pull it off, but Irv’s sticky fingers from eating junk food raises him up the list a tad because of a sticky residue that is found at various sites of the Mecha Mutt’s attack.

 

Dial this mystery up to eleven!

So which one of these suspects is behind the rampaging robot? Or could it actually be the notorious “Space Specter,” an old legend about a ship that lost control while piloting through some space mist, where apparently a spirit attached itself to the ship and now anytime something goes wrong at NASA, they blame the supposed spectre. No, of course, it’s not an actual spectre from space; the culprit is none other than Melanie Staples, who resented the fact that for her whole life, her father’s work came first. “You’ve ignored and neglected me, never once seeing how brilliant I am. So I decided to show him how brilliant, and if I had to destroy his career, not to mention the entire space program to get his attention, so be it.” I have to admire this show for giving us a “villain” with a motivation other than the standard monetary or revenge motifs, and though the sticky residue we see found at the various crime scenes was clearly the same gum residue that Melanie would have picked up from landing in Fred’s trap at the start of the show, it still works as a solid mystery.

“And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for you meddling space cadets.”

Scooby-Doo! Mecha Mutt Menace was the fourth in a series of direct-to-video and was released by Warner Bros. Animation on the DVD 13 Spooky Tales: Ruh-Roh Robot, and its short twenty-two-minute run-time provided fans with a fun adventure to hold them over between feature-length movie releases.

Dinosaurus (1960) – Review

Movies featuring man pitted against prehistoric beasts have been popular since 1925’s The Lost World, where Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale featured a mysterious plateau rife with dinosaurs, and with the success of modern films like Jurassic World, where genetic engineering replaced lost continents, the dinosaur genre has proven itself to always have a spot in the hearts of moviegoers. In 1960 Jack H. Harris, the man behind the classic sci-fi/horror film The Blob, gave the world Dinosaurus! a cinematic masterpiece detailing the age-old story of man’s noble goal to encounter giant monsters and then run screaming from them.

 The first problem a filmmaker has is figuring out how does one go about encountering a dinosaur 65 million years after they have gone extinct? Well, finding hidden prehistoric worlds isn’t easy as you'd think, despite what films like 1957’s The Land Unknown would have you believe, but there is always the option of waking a hibernating dinosaur by way of atomic testing as was done in the Harryhausen classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – though that can lead to nasty radioactive side-effects – and then, of course, we have the “Build Your Own Monster” of the Jurassic Park series, but that has its own problems, mainly production costs and the insanely high park insurance premiums you’d have to layout, which leads us to Dinosaurus! where the construction of a new island harbour brings two ancient enemies to life.

 

We’re talking pennies on the dollar and no radioactive fallout.

The plot of Dinosaurus! is fairly simple, a group of American engineers have been using explosives to increase the draft of a Caribbean harbour when one of the explosions opens a rift to a frozen undersea river, and out of this fissure comes the frozen bodies of a Brontosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Head engineer and the film’s stalwart hero, Bart Thompson (Ward Ramsey) stations a stereotypically drunk Irishman (James Logan) to watch over this prehistoric find only to have things quickly become complicated when a lightning strike bringing the two beasts back to life. Now, one would think two prehistoric titans would provide enough thrills for any movie, but you’d be wrong, we also have shady deputy mayor Mike Hacker (Fred Engelberg) who upon discovering the frozen corpse of a caveman (Gregg Martell), who had apparently also washed ashore due to the explosions, decides to keep this finding for himself so as to make some big bucks on the sly.

Science Note: The Tyrannosaurus Rex lived during the Cretaceous period and the Brontosaurus during the Jurassic period, so not sure how exactly those two would have been frozen together, but then again we also have a caveman frozen in the same area, who is about 65 million years distant from either of those creatures, so one must assume the writers of this film based their science on episodes of The Flintstones.

And what kind of dinosaur film would we have if it didn’t also include a plucky kid? For Dinosaurus! we have Julio (Alan Roberts), an orphan island boy who is routinely abused by Hacker. I’m not sure what the exact nature of the relationship between Julio and Hacker is, other than possibly adopted slave labour, but it’s never made clear and seems only to exist so as to illustrate just how much of an asshat Hacker is. That Julio would eventually run into and befriend the caveman should surprise no one but that the two immediately domesticates the Brontosaurus did catch me off guard.

 

The prehistoric Uber.

For a movie barely over eighty minutes there is a lot going on, we have the aforementioned dastardly plan to exploit the caveman – which leads to Hacker and a couple of lackeys chasing the boy and the caveman around the island – there's Bart’s pal Chuck (Paul Lukather) getting the villagers up to a fortress to protect them from the rampaging T-Rex, and then there is Bart’s girlfriend Betty Piper (Kristina Hanson) who catches the eye of the caveman – who, to be fair, hasn’t been laid in over 100,000 years – and he kidnaps poor Betty and drags her into an abandoned mine.

 

“Well, I’ve had worse dates.”

As Dinosaurus! is a family film we don’t have to worry about sexual assault happening between these two – the caveman quickly moves on from groping Betty to forcing her to cook him dinner – but before things can get even more awkward Hacker and the T-Rex show up. This messy conflict results in the cavemen dying – holding the mine’s crumbling ceiling up while Betty and Julio escape – but Hacker gets his own just reward, that of being crushed under a pile of rocks while the T-Rex just wanders off to find some easier lunch.

 

Unfortunately, his lunch is stolen by some quicksand.

The dinosaur action for this film is done by way of stop-motion animation, the primary method used for all such films until Jurassic Park and computer-generated images changed the monster making landscape forever, and it’s this style of dinosaur filmmaking that I will always have a soft spot for as there seems to be more personality in these Claymation creations then there is in their later computer made brethren. The dinosaurs in this film were also created by model maker extraordinaire Marcel Delgado, who was the man that constructed the Kong model that Willis O’Brien animated in the original 1933 King Kong – that does add a bit of pedigree to this film – and the model of the Brontosaurus itself made a second appearance in a cameo for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Odyssey of Flight 33” where a poor passenger plane finds itself lost in time.

 

“What a twist.”

Director Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. wasn’t given a huge budget for this feature so as a dinosaur film there isn’t a whole lot of dinosaur action, and Marcel Delgado wasn't given enough time with the models which resulted in less than smooth animation, and because of this much of the film’s running time is spent with the rather dull humans. Lucky for us one of the humans that the film does focus on is the confused and befuddled caveman and we are talking comedic gold here as we get to watch him explore a modern amenities flush toilet – which he finds terrifying – a ham radio, and the confusion of his reflection in a full-length mirror, which all adds pure unadulterated fun to what would otherwise have been a rather dull affair. Gregg Martell’s fantastic performance as the Neanderthal cannot be underrated, as are the make-up effects provided by make-up artist Don L. Cash, and aside from the few cool dinosaur moments, and I do mean few, this is what makes the film so entertaining.

 

“Have any of you guys read this script?”

Overall Dinosaurus! is an amusing adventure flick that if one were to look past its flaws, such as the poor optical work and a cast of mostly two-dimensional characters, you can have a really good time viewing this somewhat forgotten adventure film, and how could anyone not love a film that ends with a fight between a mechanical digger and a Tyrannosaurus Rex?

 

Losing to King Kong is one thing, this is embarrassing.

Final Note: That the Brontosaurus, the caveman, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex all die by the end of the film kind of bummed me out, but I guess Jack Harris was going for one of those “tragic and poetic endings” so I can let that slide. So, if you haven’t seen Dinosaurus! and are a fan of the genre this is a film you should think about tracking down, and the recent Bluray really shows off the cinemascope photography and the print looks fantastic.

Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright (2013) – Review

Gaston Leroux’s classic tale The Phantom of the Opera is one of the most adapted literary horror stories to date – only beaten out by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula – so it’s a bit surprising that it took Scooby-Doo and the gang this long to give us their take on this classic tale. What is even stranger is that Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright isn’t a musical, we were already subjected to Scooby-Doo! Music of the Vampire – with some of the worst Disney knock-off songs to date – but when it comes to adapting The Phantom of the Opera, which they set during a talent competition, they don’t go full-on Andrew Lloyd Webber for some reason. Talk about a wasted opportunity.

The movie opens with Scooby and the gang arriving in the Windy City because Fred (Frank Welker) and Daphne (Grey Griffin) are finalists for a talent show, called Talent Star, meanwhile, Velma (Mindy Cohn) is interested in checking out the local showing of the famous “Soap Diamond” while Scooby and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) or more focused on the city’s famed deep-dish pizza. Unfortunately, the opera house which the show will be held in is being terrorized by a masked phantom, surprisingly this is information that Shaggy takes in stride, “Of course it’s haunted, like when do we ever go to a place that is not haunted?” Though the opera house is over one hundred years old this particular phantom made his first appearance back in the 70s when the place had been converted into a disco.

 

I guess organ music and disco just don’t mix.

With Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright we not only get a nice homage to Gaston Leroux’s literary masterpiece, with the Phantom demanding that his Christine win the talent show, but we are inundated with possible suspects as to who the real phantom could be. First, we have Brick Pimiento (Wayne Brady), the host of Talent Star, who points out that the Phantom’s attacks are doing wonders for the show’s ratings. Next is Mel Richmond (Jeff Bennett) the theatre owner, who has been losing money on the opera house ever since he inherited it from his dad, and he jokes about burning it down for the insurance money. We meet you violin virtuoso Emma Gale (Isabella Acres) whose family needs the contest prize money so the bank doesn’t foreclose on their farm. We also have singer Lotte Lavoie (Vivica A. Fox) who constantly threatens violence on her fellow contestants, one of which is stage magician The Great Pauldini (John O'Hurley) whose stagecraft could easily create The Phantom’s antics, and finally we have Chrissy Damon (Ariel Winter) aka Christine, a spoiled girl with overbearing stage parents.

 

An angel of music she is not.

As much as this is a Scooby-Doo spin on The Phantom of the Opera there are major differences from the source material – Gaston Leroux didn’t even have a dog in his story – in this version, Christine is an abrasive diva, not the sweet ingénue of the book and is more like the character of Carlotta, but here we also have Lotte Lavoie’s who kind of takes on aspects of Carlotta as well, and it is her voice that is sabotaged by the Phantom. In Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright there is no true Christine analog as this particular Phantom has no muse, at most we have Fred and Daphne’s love story filling in for Christine’s and Raoul’s tryst from Gaston Leroux’s book.

Now, it is the love story between Fred and Daphne that is easily my favourite part of this movie, first we have Daphne quietly mooning over the seemingly oblivious Fred while everyone else in the Scooby gang are completely aware of the pair's feelings for each other, but we get a wonderful payoff with Daphne writing a love ballad to music that Fred wrote, leading to the two finally declaring their love. Unfortunately, the film later undercuts this during the end credits with Fred and Daphne both wondering if that declaration was just part of the act or if the other really meant it. Aside from this return to the “status quo” I found this movie handled the Fred/Daphne relationship better than any film before or since.

 

“Summer lover, don't go away.”

Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright also has one of my favourite meta-exchanges between characters, with Daphne pondering the strangeness of the Scooby gang constantly running into ghosts and monsters, leading to this wonderful interchange.
Daphne: “Fred, why do ghosts and monsters and stuff turn up wherever we go? Is it something about us?”
Fred: “No, this happens to everyone. It would be too much of a coincidence if this only happened to us, so logically, everyone must run into ghosts and monsters all the time.”
Daphne: “Really?”
Fred: “Sure! It's simple math. They must be everywhere.”

 

You can’t argue with that kind of logic.

So who is the Phantom of this particular Opera? The villain reveal aspect of this movie makes this entry stand out from the rest, in the past, we’ve had villains wearing multiple masks, and in Chill-Out, Scooby-Doo! we had a monster and a villain that was not actually connected but in Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright we get four villains, all with their own motives. First, the gang chase the Phantom into the sewers below the opera house, where they discover the lair of Steve Trilby (Paul Rugg), who was the notorious Phantom terrorizing the opera house back when it became a discotheque, but he's not actually behind the current attacks on Talent Star, he was only prowling around looking for food to steal, he had remained a reclusive Phantom all these years because thought he was hideous freak, unfortunately, this was only due to the fact that his only mirror was a funhouse mirror. Then Mel Richmond is unmasked and admits to trying to burn down his "money-losing theatre" for the insurance money, which makes his early joking faux pas extremely stupid. Next Lance Damon, in Phantom garb, is caught trying to break Emma’s violin because he wanted his daughter Chrissie to win the talent contest. Then another Phantom is revealed to be assistant director Dewey Ottoman (Peter MacNicol) who was using the Phantom threat to draw the police away from the museum that displaying the famous Soap Diamond so that he could steal it. And finally, we have Velma revealing footage of Pimiento putting on the Phantom costume which he admits that he used the Phantom to boost the show's falling ratings.

They all would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids.

Stray Observations:

• In this movie, Fred’s character is treated with a greater amount of respect and though he may still be a little trap obsessed – we find out that he sleeps with a net – when up against the villain he is a true man of action. He even uses his ascot to grapple with the Phantom.
• Steve Trilby believed he was disfigured due to his only mirror being a funhouse mirror, but this means he somehow went through his ENTIRE life growing up without ever looking at his reflection. Even for a Scooby-Doo movie that is a bit of a stretch.
• Chrissie ends up being one of the final three finalists but shouldn’t she have been disqualified immediately when her dad was exposed as being one of the Phantoms?
• Fred and Daphne’s love ballad win them more votes than Emma, which means Emma’s family would lose the farm, and they then start telling bad jokes so as a way to throw the contest, but how would that even work? Can people call in and un-vote?

 

Regardless, these two will always have my vote.

Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright was twenty-first entry in the direct-to-video series of Scooby-Doo animated films and is easily one of my favourites – if they had gone full-on musical with this movie it could possibly have eclipsed Zombie Island – as the multiple villains aspect of this movie was pure genius, and we even have moment at the end where a police officer asks the audience, “Is anyone else the Phantom? Show of hands” which is just brilliant. Then we have Grey Griffin’s stammering performance of Daphne’s delightful awkwardness with Fred, which is simply hilarious making this the cherry on top of an already amazing desert. Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright wonderfully showcased the relationship between Daphne and Fred while still giving the rest of the Scooby gang fun moments - Velma in top form unravelling suspect after suspect, making this a Scooby-Doo movie that will delight fans and novices alike, so if you haven’t seen this one yet do yourself a favour and hunt it down.

 

"The Phantom of the opera is here. Inside my mind."

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) – Review

The Mark Twain quote “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” can be considered the backbone of this final chapter of the Skywalker Saga as director J.J. Abrams tries to course correct the damaged incurred with Star Wars: The Last Jedi by bringing back Emperor Palpatine, the big baddie from the original series, despite the last time we saw him he had been tossed down a shaft moments before the Death Star exploded. How is his return possible? To quote Monty Python and The Holy Grail, “It's just a scratch. I've had worse.”

 The film opens with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) searching the galaxy for something called a Wayfinder, an ancient Sith device that would reveal the location of the planet Exogol, which is home to Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) who rumours say somehow survived his death at the Battle of Endor. Now, don’t expect much explanation as to how this is possible other than some quick hand waving about clones and the Dark Side of the Force, you're expected to roll with it. Meanwhile, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) hope to get Intel from a supposed mole deep insider The First Order, who this turns out to be is as obvious as it is moronic, and while all this is going on our Jedi hero Rey (Daisy Ridley) continues her Jedi training with General Leia (Carrie Fisher) in the hopes of someday earning the right to wield Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. Once our heroes learn of the Emperor’s supposed return they decide that must get a Wayfinder of their own – available soon at your local Disney Store – but the quest for the location of Exogol is not without its challenges.

 

“Do any of us even know what a Wayfinder looks like?

In lieu of plot, Abrams has decided to go with a scavenger hunt motif and this is easily the biggest stumbling block facing Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker as the bulk of its 142 minute running time deals with our heroes running around looking for items that will lead them to the final boss fight, as we follow them through several misadventures that have little to no bearing on the plot. Everything here is action-packed and exciting but sadly there is little time for emotional substance or relevance, “Look, we found ancient writings on a Sith artifact maybe it will lead us to our next MacGuffin,” and this goes on for quite some time, worse is the fact that the script constantly throws idiotic obstacles in their path that seem to exist for the sole purpose of filling in time before the big showdown. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that J.J. Abrams and company had figured out the ending to this mess – and I will admit it is a fairly satisfying ending – but then realized they still had the proceeding ninety minutes to fill with something…anything…everything!

 

“Are you going to be the hot new action figure?”

When wrapping up a nine picture saga the last thing you need to do is start introducing new characters – or tossing in old fan favourites like Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) – yet good ole J.J. can’t seem to help himself, thus we meet up with the helmeted and enigmatic Zori (Keri Russell), a criminal pal of Poe’s past, and Jannah (Naomi Ackie), who leads a tribal effort to take on the First Order and ends up teaming up with Finn because Rey is constantly running off on her own so that she can be angst-ridden and mysterious, so he needs a new action buddy.

 

Trust me, this is even dumber than it looks.

Once all the silliness of everyone running around is over, as if they were in a Star Wars version of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the movie does settle down with some solid confrontational moments, and the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren is the heart of this movie and both Ridley and Driver pull off fantastic performances here, but it would have been even greater if J.J. Abrams wasn’t so insistent at keeping things moving at such a breakneck speeds thus giving us time to care. Before any emotional moment can build we are whisked off to another frenetic action scene with a bunch of characters we could care less about – does anyone else think both Poe and Finn have become utter wankers – and though the visuals are as stunning expected the original Star Wars films have stood the test of time because it followed a small group of characters that we the audience grew to love, yet this new trilogy seems hung up on whiz-bang effects while sacrificing time and effort needed to breathe life into our heroes. In The Force Awakens Abrams seemed a little calmer, helped I’m sure by the fact that he was mostly copying the structure of A New Hope, but with The Rise of Skywalker it seems as if he is trying to cram in every idea he ever had without checking to see if it served the story.

Stray Observations:

• Light Speed skipping sure looks cool, how it even remotely makes sense I’ll leave for others to explain.
• The way the filmmakers integrated unused footage of the late Carrie Fisher worked really well.
• It seems even the Star Wars universe has a Burning Man Festival.
• Our heroes fall into quicksand, now if only one of the party’s members had Force powers to levitate them to safety.
• The Knights of Ren pop up every now and then as if hoping that someone will think they’re cool enough to get their own Disney+ television series.
• Anyone else get a Goonies vibe with the Sith Dagger map?
• The tactical deployment of Palpatine’s massive fleet made the decisions at Pearl Harbour seem sensible.
• A mounted ground assault on the surface of a Star Destroyer is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a Star Wars movie
•  

 

Even Michael Bay is laughing at this.

With The Rise of Skywalker J.J. Abrams attempts to pull the franchise out of the nosedive that Rian Johnson had put them in – going so far as to dismiss elements entirely and making joking references to events in The Last Jedi – and even though “startling” revelations often get lost in the overall action it still manages to land with a mostly satisfying conclusion, but one does wonder how things would have turned out if Abrams had directed all three of the films or at least been given a fourth installment to further build his story instead having to cram this ending into one big chaotic mess. Regardless, The Rise of Skywalker is at least an entertaining enough action flick, if a bit of a mess with character development sacrificed for hammered in plot contrivances, but it’s far from the worst entry in the franchise. If that seems like damming with faint praise…well, let the Force be with you.

Scooby-Doo! and the Spooky Scarecrow (2013) – Review

When it comes to animated Halloween specials the all-round king would be It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown but when it comes to horror for the holidays one must still give props to Scooby-Doo and the gang and in 2013 an all-new episode titled Scooby-Doo! and the Spooky Scarecrow was released on a two-disc DVD 13 Spooky Tales: Run for Your Rife as part of a collection thirteen various episodes from the Scooby-Doo show, giving fans a very fun and light Halloween romp.  It's not Haddonfield but almost as dangerous.

 This twenty-two minute short centers on the Scooby gang visiting Cobb Corner for their annual Halloween Festival. Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker) seem surprisingly excited to visit this small town’s festivities despite the scary Halloween theme - you’d think these two would avoid any celebration of this particular holiday - but understanding quickly dawns on us viewers when Shaggy lists off the menu, “They make corn on the cob, corn muffins, cornbread, kettle corn, and corn dogs. It’s a regular corn-u-copia.” Unfortunately, the festival is in danger of being cancelled due to the monstrous figure of Cornfield Clem, a town legend who is now terrorizing anyone who dares set foot within the corn maze.

 

Has entering a cornfield ever been a good idea in a horror movie?

Mayor Husk (Gary Anthony Williams) is quick to assure the townsfolk that, “There is a reasonable explanation” and that the festival will continue despite many people wanting it cancelled before someone gets hurt. Sheriff Kern (Wendie Malick) urges caution and orders the corn maze to be closed and off-limits, posting a monosyllabic handyman named Abner (Steve Blum) to ensure no meddling kids wander in.  Now, raise your hand if you think this is going to stop Mystery Incorporated from investigating.   Scooby-Doo! and the Spooky Scarecrow is not one of the animated features, it having the standard running time of an average episode of the series, so there isn’t much time to set-up plot and or suspects, we have the Mayor and Sherriff acting a little suspicious at times but they both have more to lose if this particular mystery isn’t solved. Next, we have Mr. Bumpy (Jeff Bennett) the proprietor of a novelty shop that specializes in Cornfield Clem merchandise and costumes as he could be using the appearance of the scarecrow to drum up business, but the cancellation of the festival could harm tourist trade so that kind of puts him out of the running.

 

I have a hunch he’s not guilty.

When the gang learns that a year ago there was a bank robbery that resulted in the crook having to abandon his car, it being found near the cornfield, and the loot too big to be carried away by hand it all becomes quite obvious as to what is going on. Velma (Mindy Cohn) quickly deduces that the police roadblocks forced the crook to bury his ill-gotten gains in the nearby field, with plans to return and dig it up later but not knowing that the field was recently planted with corn.  When he eventually returns to spot he buried the loot he found a full-grown cornfield.  So, what can a man do in such a situation?  Well, he purchased a Cornfield Clem costume from Mr. Bumpy and used it and the legend of the scarecrow to buy himself some searching time.

And who is this criminal mastermind? None other than Abner, that country bumpkin who Velma noticed had very soft hands – one could almost say safecracker hands – for a supposed country farmhand. No big surprise there. Scooby-Doo! and the Spooky Scarecrow may not have the most original mystery but works perfectly well for this shorter format, and the Scooby gang are all allowed some time to shine.

 

Even Fred isn’t forced to embarrass himself in this adventure.

Stray Observations:

• When the gang arrives in town we can hear Velma creepily saying “We’re here” as a nice nod to the horror film Poltergeist.
• According to legend Cornfield Clem was a scarecrow brought to life by a 16th-century witch who was run out of town.  The Scarecrow was then cursed to haunt the town every year at Halloween time. As in Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost we learn of real witchcraft, but of course, this legend may have been a load of hogwash.
• Shaggy is seen wearing a Blue Falcon costume, a reference to the direct-to-video film Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon.
• Sheriff Kern obviously likes drama with a dash of musical theatre, “That field isn’t just full of corn, and it’s growing a crop of evil as high as an elephant’s eye.”
• An idiot criminal burying his loot in a field and later not being able to find the spot could be a reference to the film Fargo.

 

I could see Steve Buscemi playing this part in a live-action adaptation.

Scooby-Doo! and the Spooky Scarecrow is a solid little Halloween special that really harkens back to the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! as it gives us good mystery, a nice amount of clues, and even though the suspect pool is a little shallow the plot is still well-executed. Add to all this is the great animation on display and the stellar voice work by all concerned, you have Scooby-Doo entry well worth a visit…at least once a year.