Daphne & Velma (2018) – Review

In the fifth installment of the Scooby-Doo live-action film series, we get another “reboot” with a different take on how the Scooby gang first met, or to be more accurate, how two of the Scooby gang first met because you won’t find Fred, Shaggy over even Scooby-Doo in this particular mystery. The big question here is, “Can you have a proper Scooby gang mystery with only 40% of the gang?”

This movie posits the idea that Daphne (Sarah Jeffery ) and Velma (Sarah Gilman) had become best friends via online social media, with Daphne’s parents being globetrotting tech purveyors preventing her from making any real-life friends, but when Daphne’s parents move to Velma’s hometown of Ridge Valley our lovely redhead thinks it will be great to be meet Velma in person, but how wrong she is. Turns out Velma is a social pariah at Ridge Valley and she immediately shuns Daphne as if the poor girl had the plague.

 

And just why would her online BFF give Daphne the cold shoulder?

In the previous live-action Scooby-Doo movies there was always a supernatural element of some sort but with Daphne & Velma we return to the “It’s just some dude in a mask” format of the original cartoon, unfortunately, the mystery we are saddled with is all kinds of moronic. The plot of this movie centers around the strange goings-on at Ridge Valley High where brightest and most popular kids are being turned into mindless zombies – sadly, not the flesh-eating kind but more the paste-eating kind – and to prevent being a target Velma has worked hard to keep her school scores really low. Does Velma warn Daphne of this issue, so that she can take proper precautions? Nope, she just acts like a complete jerk for no logical reason and leaves her friend to flounder in ignorance. As an actress, I think Sarah Gilman was a decent choice for the part of Velma but the film spent way so much time making her unlikeable that at a running time of a mere 75-minutes we don’t have enough time to get to know the real Velma. The script sets up Velma as this abject coward who only thinks of her own safety, and that is not the Velma I know.  I always thought Shaggy and Scooby supposed to be the cowardly ones.

 

Velma, the cowardly blogger.

As for the mystery itself, well, there isn’t much going on here either. We learn that Ridge Valley High is sponsored by a tech billionaire named Tobias Bloom (Brooks Forester), who is using the school to beta test his latest inventions, and when the ideas belonging to the brilliant students who get "mind-wiped" are announced as the “latest” Bloom innovations, the very next day, it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmesian intellect to figure out who is behind it all.   This puts Daphne and Velma in a very bad light as it makes them look like total idiots. Sure, this is their first mystery together, and one can’t expect them to be in the groove yet, but their bungling around as they futilely try and solve this case just points out how much we miss Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. It was those two who brought that kind of comic relief to the Scooby-Doo mysteries and saddling this aspect onto Daphne and Velma just doesn’t work.

 

Slapstick comedy, anyone?

So, with the guilty party obviously being Bloom we aren’t left with much of an actual mystery to solve, the film does try and throw in some random suspects but none of them are even briefly credible. We have Two-Mop-Maggie (Mickie Pollock) the gruff janitor with a surly attitude, and then we have Griffin Griffiths (Evan Castelloe), who could be taking out the competition so that he can uphold the family legacy of being top dog at Ridgely High, next we have Daphne’s dad (Brian Stepanek) who is revealed to be a stalker of his own child – under the pretense of keeping her safe – and he even goes to the point of floating around the school dressed as the Grim Reaper, making him not so much a suspect as an utter moron and a terrible parent. Now, the movie does try and throw a twist at the end with the big surprise reveal that tech billionaire Tobias Bloom doesn’t actually exist, that he was a hologram created by fellow Ridge Valley High student Carol (Vanessa Marano), who is actually a twenty-six years old woman who disguised herself as a senior student/advisor to better monitor the pupils for their ideas because she had become creatively bankrupt.

 

The plot is a little more Bond villain than I’d expected.

Stray Observations:

• Velma has always been depicted as the brainy one of the group but her becoming the clichéd nerd outcast in high school was not a needed backstory element.
• In this movie internet shaming becomes part of a school curriculum. Is this idea ridiculous or a portent of things to come?
• One of the students has the idea of a phone making food and this somehow translates into Bloom coming up with a 3D printer that can replicate food. Do the writers not understand that coming up with an idea is not the same as realizing the final product. Many people have thought about teleportation and yet we still don’t have “Beam me up, Scotty.”
• Daphne’s father isn’t just an extreme helicopter parent he must also be a precog to be able to help her avoid random accidents that threaten his daughter's safety.
• I give the film credit for having two female leads solving the mystery without men giving them a helping hand – Daphne’s idiot dad notwithstanding – but why did the villain also have to be a woman?

 

And Velma can karate chop lasers?

I liked the dynamic of Daphne being a Fox Mulder type “The Truth is Out There” character while Velma was her more supportive but skeptical friend, if not downright cynical at times, but the film’s forced conflict between them was so contrived as to be pretty much unbelievable. We never get a plausible reason for why Velma would shun Daphne at school because the idea of “I did it to protect you” just doesn’t wash. Knowledge is power and leaving your friend in the dark is more likely to put her in danger than to protect her. Daphne & Velma has been trumpeted as a “Girl Power” movie but the script does them no favours and though I have no problem with the idea of a Scooby-Doo movie without Scooby-Doo this was certainly not the way to go about it.

This could have easily been any one of a dozen Disney Channel Originals without it being forced into the mould of a Scooby-Doo spin-off, it could have been an extended episode of K.C. Undercover with Zendaya without much script tweaking needed, and the end result is a movie that is more disappointing than just outright bad and one that I can’t recommend to fans of Scooby-Doo.

A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995) – Review

Adapting the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table is nothing new to the people at Disney having already given us the animated classic The Sword and the Stone, yet with A Kid in King Arthur’s Court we not only get another King Arthur movie from Disney but also their second adaptation of Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - the previous incarnation being the goofy sci-fi fantasy movie Unidentified Flying Oddball back in 1978 - unfortunately, this swing at the bat is a clear miss.

If possible A Kid in King Arthur’s Court is an even looser adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel than the Unidentified Flying Oddball was and being that film involved a space shuttle and robots that is saying something, but this 90s take on the story is more a case of "Rookie of the Year meets Medieval Times." The protagonist of this story is one Calvin Fuller (Thomas Ian Nicholas), a Little League baseball player so bad at the game that he’s too terrified to even swing at the ball. After another pathetic strike-out at-bat Calvin finds himself thrown back in time, due to an earthquake opening a rift that plunges him back into the Dark Ages, where his impromptu arrival lands him on the head of the Black Knight and saving the Crown Jewels of Camelot in the process.

 

“It’s only a model.”

Calvin quickly finds himself mixed up in court intrigue as this particular King Arthur (Joss Ackland) is a doddering ruler and Guinevere is long dead as is the wizard, Merlin, while the evil Lord Belasco (Art Malik) has been robbing the citizens’ blind in the name of the king. For some reason Belasco considers Calvin a threat accuses him of being a spy and challenges him to Trial by Combat, but as Calvin is the one being challenged he has the choice of weapons and so he chooses “Combat Rock” and proceeds to attach his Sony Discman to a couple of drinking horns. The Rock and Roll cacophony that follows shocks the court and drives Belasco from the room, it’s this scene that pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the film. Throughout the movie Calvin will use various modern objects, whether found in his knapsack or redesigned by the local blacksmith, to thwart the evil machinations of Lord Belasco.

 

You know your film is in trouble if this is your chief villain.

As the goal with most Arthurian villains, Belasco wants the throne for himself, but as the King’s eldest daughter Princess Sarah (Kate Winslet) has refused to marry any of her suitors – she’s hung up, on the whole, marry for love thing – and thus who she marries will now be settled at the upcoming tournament, something Belasco would rather avoid. Meanwhile, Calvin starts to fall in love with the King’s youngest daughter, Princess Katey (Paloma Baeza), and much of the film’s running time is spent with him teaching her about rollerblading, bicycling and eating Big Macs. The fish out of water element of this story is quite downplayed and instead focuses more on Calvin developing a backbone and learning to fight. He is introduced to the castle’s swordmaster Kane (Daniel Craig), who tries to teach him swordplay and jousting, but Kane’s real purpose to the plot of this movie is that he is the secret lover of Princess Sarah.

 

“I like my plots shaken not stirred.”

Now, to call what follows a “plot” is using the term rather loosely as A Kid in King Arthur’s Court isn’t all that concerned with story structure or even making a lick of sense. We get Calvin communicating with the spirit of Merlin (Ron Moody) through a magic well – Merlin’s terrible spellcasting from beyond the grave being responsible for Calvin’s arrival in Camelot – and Lord Belasco’s moronic plot to seize the throne, a plot that involves kidnapping Princess Kate so as to force Princess Sarah to marry him, “If you do not consent then Princess Katherine will die.” That he then accuses Calvin of murdering Princess Kate and orders him arrested is not only moronic but makes no sense because there is nobody to prove a murder took place and if Katey were actually dead he’d lose his hold on Princess Sarah. The problem here is that Belasco’s power behind the throne is never quite made clear. Is King Arthur simply a puppet and that all the knights and nobles secretly support Lord Belasco? If so why not simply seize the throne? If Belasco doesn’t have military support needed to overthrow Arthur once his plot is exposed, which is exactly what would happen once Sarah was either returned or confirmed as being murdered, nothing would stop either Sarah or the King from ordering his execution. This entire film hinges on the audience not giving anything we hear or see a second's thought.

 

“Arthur, the Once and Future Doddering Old King!”

Stray Thoughts:

• Ron Moody seems to be reprising his role as Merlin from Unidentified Flying Oddball.
• I’m not sure “Combat Rock” could be considered a form of weaponry. I was kind of hoping he’d challenge Belasco to a Battle of the Bands.
• No matter how talented a 6th-century blacksmith was he would not be able to build functional rollerblades with the tools and materials of the time.
• Calvin uses Krazy Glue to stick his hands to the lance as well as his butt to the saddle, but when he is unhorsed, saddle and all, his hands and butt are miraculously freed.
• Belasco’s plans at first seem to be derived from him not wanting to participate in the tournament, him being a weaselly court flunky this would be understandable, but then he turns out to be very good at jousting and he takes out several knights.  So what's his deal?
• King Arthur announces that all freedmen can enter the tournament, which would allow Master Kay to compete and win the hand of Princess Sarah, but why couldn’t he simply grant knighthood to Kay in the first place?

 

And what about the mysterious Black Knight?

The only interesting element of A Kid in King Arthur’s Court is the reveal that the shadowy Black Knight was not actually a villain at all - he’s seen by Calvin and Katey giving food to the starving populace of Camelot and even gives aid to Calvin and Arthur - but the even bigger reveal is that the Black Knight is none other than Princess Sarah herself, who wins the tournament and her right to choose her own husband. If this film had ditched the whole Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court aspect and just made a movie about Kate Winslet the badass princess, with Daniel Craig as her love interest, we’d have had a much better movie, instead, what we are left with is lame comedy and plot that couldn’t withstand the scrutiny of a ten-year-old. A Kid in King Arthur’s Court is a film to be avoided but if you’d like to watch a fun Disney take on the Mark Twain story then do check out 1978’s Unidentified Flying Oddball, it’s a lot more fun.

Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster (2010) – Review

With Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster we get Cartoon Network’s sequel to the 2009 prequel Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins making this the fourth installment in the live-action Scooby-Doo series but it’s also another made-for-television production.

Due to an accidental barn burning during a battle with the “Vengeful Scarecrow” at Old Man Frickert's farm the Scooby gang need summer jobs to pay for the damages, lucky for our heroes Daphne’s uncle Thornton "Thorny" Blake the 5th (Ted McGinley) has opened a new country club and offered them all positions there. The group’s dynamic takes a rather romantic shift in this adventure with Daphne (Kate Melton) and Fred (Robbie Amell) having becoming involved after their fracas with the Vengeful Scarecrow, which landed Daphne in Fred’s arms, and when finally arriving at the country club Shaggy (Nick Palatas) literally falls into the arms of Velma (Hayley Kiyoko), and though she remains rather blind to his infatuation he's madly in love with her.

 

“Summer loving had me a blast. Summer loving happened so fast!”

No sooner does the gang settle into their new jobs then the country club’s opening night party is crashed by a huge frog-like monster, a beast the gang had been warned about by the seemingly crazy woman (Marion Ross) at the local gas station. Apparently, she had told everyone that the country club should never have been built there as it would cause the “Lake Monster” to return. The gang quickly decides to talk to Mr. Uggins (Richard Moll) the operator of a creepy lighthouse, and the only person known to have ever taken a picture of the lake monster, which leads to an attack by said lake monster only for it be unmasked as Mr. Uggins himself. Turns out there isn’t a lot of money in lighthouse keeping and this was his best way of making a quick buck.

 

He should go back to being a bailiff at Night Court.

Though this particular lake monster turned out to be a fraud he wasn’t behind the attack at the country club and it is from Mr. Uggins that the gang learns the history and curse of the lake monster. It seems that when people first settled in Erie Point an old woman named Wanda Grubwort (Beverly Sanders) warned them not to come onto her land but they paid no attention to her and so she used her magic staff - which used blue moonstones as the source of her power - to turn a frog into a horrible monster that then attacked the villagers. This didn’t go over well with the settlers so Wanda was tried for witchcraft and burnt at the stake. Now, the witch has somehow returned to rebuild her magic staff and is using the lake monster to find the moonstones that powered it.

 

Who is actually behind the lake monster?

There really isn’t much of a mystery behind Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster and though the gang do run around looking for clues, with Daphne surprisingly being the best at this aspect of the mystery-solving, but much of the film’s runtime is spent on the romantic entanglements amongst the Scooby gang. We have Fred’s belief that he and Daphne are just having some “Summer Fun” while she is under the impression they are in a serious relationship, and then we have Scooby (Frank Welker) becoming jealous of Shaggy’s crush on Velma. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with this kind of teen romance showing up in a Scooby-Doo adventure but the way it’s handled is about as clichéd as one can get, which makes one wish you were watching Caddyshack instead. Things only get interesting again when the gang figures out that the crazy gas station owner is a descendant of the witch and head to her house for the big confrontation, only for the big “unmasking” to reveal that Velma had been the witch all along.

 

“Holy twist endings, Batman!”

Turns out that a blue gemstone Velma picked up while beachcombing was one of the lost moonstones belonging to Wanda Grubwort, this allowed the witch to possess poor Velma resulting in such weird behaviour as her destroying clues, being afraid of fire and suddenly sporting warts. Basically, Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster isn't so much a Scooby-Doo mystery as it was a straight-up horror movie - well, a horror-comedy movie - but there's no big reveal that someone was behind the witch’s monstrous shenanigans other than the actual witch.

 

There was a curse. There was a real witch. The monsters were real.

Stray Observations:

• This movie is a rarity in the Scooby-Doo lexicon where we see the Scooby gang having jobs and making actual money.
• When the Lake Monster attacks jeopardizes the country club Daphne exclaims, “We can’t afford to lose these jobs?” Was there a deleted scene where Daphne’s rich family disinherited her? I can understand her family wanting her to develop a good work ethic but losing a summer job would certainly not have the same impact on her that it would on the rest of the gang.
• Shaggy and Velma having a relationship also occurred in the animated series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
• Velma being unmasked as the “villain” had already been done in the animated movie Scooby-Doo in Where’s My Mummy?
• It should be noted that Curse of the Lake Monster has a couple of actual decent musical numbers.

 

“I can be scary now the night has come.”

Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster continued the theme of actual supernatural events being the primary element of the live-action Scooby-Doo movies but without there also being a “Dude in a Mask” reveal at the end as well. The teen-romance-comedy aspect of the film seemed a little forced at times though we do get the occasional moment of actual comedy, something the previous live-action movies failed to provide.  We still have the problem of a terrible CGI Scooby who the filmmakers drastically reduced in screen time to help their already shrunken budget. Overall, Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster is probably one of the more enjoyable entries of the live-action attempts and is only hampered by the lack of an actual mystery.

Assimilate (2019) – Review

There have been many adaptations of Jack Finney’s classic science fiction tale The Body Snatchers, where alien organisms arrive on Earth and quickly proceed to duplicate the inhabitants, but as this has now become almost a subgenre I see no problem with anyone taking another swing at the bat. Right off the top, I’ll state that this movie will not be replacing either the 1956 version with Kevin McCarthy nor the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland, as the best take on “alien body snatching” movies – those two pretty much have a lock on the subgenre – but with 2019’s Assimilate writer/director John Murlowski still manages to add a few nice twists of his own to make his version worth a look.

This film follows the exploits of three teens as they try and survive an insidious alien invasion – though which one of them won’t survive is quite apparent from the get-go – this trio consists of Zack Henderson (Joel Courtney) and his best friend Randy Foster (Calum Worthy) who spend much of their time in their small town of Oblivion making a web series that is to show the world the “Reality” of their home town. Why they think anyone outside of this town would give a shit is beyond me but as the internet is full of these kinds of idiots so I can’t really argue with the screenplay on that point. Rounding out the trio is Kayla Shepard (Andi Matichak) who is Zack’s high school crush and this film almost kind of love interest. That even one of these three makes it to the end of this film illustrate either how bad these aliens are at their job, as they escape the clutches of the aliens so often you could make it a drinking game, or more likely they don’t consider these idiots as a serious threat.

 

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys these three are not.

If you’ve seen any version of the alien body snatcher genre you’ll notice that director Murlowski follows the formula rather closely; the alien threat arrives, we get people claiming that loved ones are not who they say they are “That’s not my mommy!” and more and more residents will start acting like emotionless automatons as if they’ve been overdosing on Xanax. Our heroes will then scramble around town trying to prove that something sinister is happening but will either not be believed or will be futilely talking to someone who has already been swapped out and then there will be, of course, a scene where heroes have to feign emotionless so as to blend in the alien body snatchers. Pretty standard stuff and as a whole the young cast pull it off quite well – aside from the hero death exemption card that is repeatedly played throughout the film’s runtime – but where this film differs mostly from its brethren is the mechanics of the body-snatching as this time out we get a different sort of alien cloning.

 

“Just relax dear, you’ll just feel a bit of a pinch.”

Like its forefathers this film does have alien duplicates gestating in pods – you’re not a prober body-snatching film without pods – but the process Murlowski came up with for his take on the genre is rather clever. Little bacterial like spores float down to Earth where they could then group together, like some kind of alien nanotech, and form a creepy spider creature that would find a target, bite them and thus harvest their DNA. Then your traditional alien body snatching bod would grow a clone of said victim, but here is the interesting twist, the clone is a mindless creature that then instinctively hunts down the original so as to absorb their memories. Think of it as an illegal downloading process. This is certainly not as effective as just waiting for your victims to fall sleep as this often results in naked clones running around like enraged zombies.

 

“Here’s Johnny!”

Stray Observations:

• We get an opening shot of a leaf that is very reminiscent of the opening of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the alien spores affixed themselves to the neighbouring plant life.
• The aliens are really slow at taking out the town’s authority figures. They immediately take out the Sheriff but then fail to turn the Deputy in an as timely fashion for some reason.
• Zack and Kayla strangely believe they can rescue her little brother from assimilation even though he’s been left in the custody of the aliens for an entire day. Even stranger is the fact that they are able to save him. A clear case of “It’s in the script” survival.
• You’d think an alien invasion force would have some kind of code identifier so that normal humans couldn’t just walk around pretending to be aliens.
• The aliens are given the same alien warning call that Donald Sutherland screeched at the end of the 1978 version.

 

For some reason, they went with CGI elongated mouths for this effect.

Overall, Assimilate is a fine teen version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with its young cast doing admirable work here, but the film’s low budget does tend to work against the film in some key sequences and thus it often comes across like a low rent version of The Faculty. I have to admire John Murlowski for trying something new with such well-tread ground, and some fans of the genre may find it a little too old hat for their tastes, but say it's well worth checking out.

Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (2009) – Review

With Warner Bros. losing faith in the live-action Scooby-Doo films as a theatrical property, a team-up with the Cartoon Network to make lower budgeted live-action versions seemed like an almost natural next step, but instead of going with a continuation of the Scooby gang’s adventures following Scooby-Doo 2: Monster Unleashed, we got a prequel that would show how the gang all met up for the first time.

This movie begins with your standard teen-comedy introductions. In the case of Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins, this means our cast of characters would meet aboard the Coolsville High School bus, where Shaggy (Nick Palatas) is tripped by your typical cliché school bully, one who just happens to be friends with Fred (Robbie Amell) and though Fred doesn’t approve of such behaviour, he doesn’t go out of his way to stop it either. Also, on board the bus is Velma (Hayley Kiyoko) the school’s resident science nerd and the beautiful Daphne (Kate Melton), who is a wealthy member of the school’s Drama Club.

 

“Have you signed the Save Ferris Bueller petition yet?”

We later find Shaggy having trouble with his locker, which somehow results in him falling headfirst into a trashcan and rolling into the principal’s office, but while there, Principal Deedle (Shawn Macdonald) gives Shaggy some advice about making friends and stamp collecting. Now, if you think a character blurting out such a non-sequitur as stamp collecting is a little weird, you’re not alone and are probably well on your way to solving this mystery.

But what is the mystery that begins this little adventure? Well, we eventually get introduced to everyone’s favourite talking Great Dane Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker) whose been having a little trouble getting adopted (him being big and excitable are apparently bad pet attributes), and this leads to him getting lost and finding himself in the Coolsville Cemetery at night, and before you can say “Jinkies,” a pair of ghosts rise out of the ground.

 

So, we’re going real ghosts here, not dudes in masks? Check.

After a terrified Scooby-Doo finds his way into Shaggy’s basement bedroom, where he is quickly adopted without anyone in the family being at all concerned where this large stray dog came from, the mystery finally gets underway. After another scuffle on the school bus causes the distracted driver to crash said bus into a nearby pole (which then smashes Vice Principal Grimes’ (Garry Chalk) new car’s windshield), Shaggy, Velma, Daphne and Fred are all sentenced to detention in the school library, while Scooby remains tethered outside.

 

Insert Breakfast Club joke here.

At this point, our ghosts make a second appearance as they swoop into the library to terrify our heroes before continuing their spectral flight to the school’s gym where a pep rally is in progress. A third mysterious figure appears, cloaked in black and wearing what is clearly a theatre mask, and he announces, “Students of Coolsville High, leave this place now or pay for all eternity.” Not only does this cause a mass exodus of the school, but it also results in Vice Principal Grimes blaming the Scooby gang for creating the hoax, so he upgrades their detention to a suspension. With no alternative but to clear their names by solving this mystery, our heroes band together to hunt down clues and expose the villainous masked spectre.

 

Who could this mysterious third ghost be?

I’ll give Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins credit for trying to give us a classic Scooby-Doo mystery, but unfortunately, it’s not a very good one, as the guilty party is fairly obvious from the outset and all the red-herrings and alternate suspects weren’t going to fool anyone. Now, just who are the suspects? First, we have the school janitor Otis (C. Ernst Harth), who hates his job and would rather be a dancer, and then we have the school’s librarian (Lorena Gale) who is angry about her budget being slashed and having to deal with illiterate students, and finally, we have Vice Principal Grimes who the gang discovered had recently checked out the book “A Practical Guide to Raising the Dead and How to Use them For Your Own Evil Purposes,” and they find this piece of incriminating evidence in the man’s own home.

 

I must say, that is a strange book to be offered by a High School library.

Well, that looks to be the nail in the coffin of Grimes’ guilt, but no sooner does the Scooby gang find themselves captured by the Masked Spectre then it is revealed that Grimes is also a prisoner of this nefarious spook. Turns out, the man behind the mask is none other than Principal Deedle who raised the ghosts of Prudence Prufrock (Leah James) and Ezekial Gallows (Brian J. Sutton )  so as to scare people away so he’d be free to look for a lost time capsule that contained a rare stamp. I’m sure there are dumber Scooby-Doo plots out there, but this one has to be near the top.

Note: At one point, towards the end of the movie, Shaggy accidentally reads the wrong spell from the book, which releases all the ghosts from Coolsville Cemetery, but he has no control over them as Deedle did nor does this onslaught of ghastly ghosts have any bearing on the mystery’s conclusion.

Stray Observations:

• This prequel ignores the series A Pup Named Scooby-Doo where the gang was shown to have met as children.
• While in detention, Velma complains that Fred only apologized to Daphne: “I just find it interesting that you apologized to the pretty girl and not to the girl whose science project you destroyed.” Now, for this bit to have worked, the studio needed to have hired someone other than Hayley Kiyoko who is very attractive. Hell, the film doesn’t even bother to try and hide how cute she is.
• Hayley Kiyoko would later go on to voice Velma for many of the Scooby-Doo cartoons and animated movies.
• The Vice Principle suspends the Scooby gang from school believing they are behind the ghostly antics plaguing Coolsville High, but the ability of high school kids to pull off such an elaborate visual effects hoax is pretty farfetched.
• Our heroes are somehow suspended without the school notifying their parents of said punishment.
• In this incarnation of Scooby-Doo, the Mystery Machine now belongs to Daphne, but Shaggy is the only one with a license to drive as he’s the oldest due to being held back a couple of years.
• Vice Principle Grimes has WWII model airplanes that can not only fly but have functioning guns. Neat, but a little odd.
• Why would the villain need the Scooby gang to recover the time capsule when his two enslaved ghosts have been shown to be quite capable of possessing mannequins and moving objects?
• We learn in this movie that Shaggy came up with the recipe for Scooby Snacks, but if that were the case, how can he and Scooby be bribed with them? Couldn’t Shaggy just make more?
• This movie continues the live-action trend of giving Velma a make-over.

 

What a surprise, who would have guessed that without her glasses she’d be hot?

It’s clear that Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins didn’t have the budget of the two theatrically released Scooby-Doo movies — the CGI for Scooby is even more cartoonish this time out — but it’s kind of odd that they’d go with a combination of real ghosts as well as a dude in a mask for this prequel, as they’d already done that shtick in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. What is more of a shame is that the mystery itself is badly written. The janitor and librarian are incredibly thin as far as suspects go, but then the film doubles down on its cheating by then having the gang discover that Grimes had checked out the ghost raising book, which begs the question, why did Grimes check out that book? Did Principal Deedle check the book out under Grimes’ name and then place it in his home to frame him? Nope, because framing someone was never really part of his plan and leaving such a powerful book lying around for someone else to discover is rather stupid.

 

I guess stamp collectors do not make for good masked villains.

On the plus side of things, I found this new cast of actors did a fine job bringing the Scooby gang to life, with Nick Palatas giving Matthew Lillard a run for his money in the Shaggy impression department, but a lazy script and a lopsided mystery sank this feature beyond salvaging, making Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins a prequel we truly didn’t need.

First Knight (1995) – Review

In this 90s big budget Arthurian epic Hollywood decided to give Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur a rest – it being the basis for such Arthurian classics as John Boorman’s Excalibur – and instead embraced the romances written by French poet Chrétien de Troyes, who actually invented the character of Lancelot. This version of the King Arthur legend also continues the annoying tradition of leaving magic out of the story, something I’ve never quite understood.

Our film opens with a text crawl explaining to the audience that, “At long last, the wars were over. The great king of Camelot had devoted his life to building a land of peace and justice. Now he wished to marry.” So, right off the top were left wondering if this is a sequel to a more exciting and possibly better movie. Who wants to watch a movie about royal senior citizen settling down to some peace and quiet? Lucky for us the crawl continues, “But the peace was not to last. The most powerful of Arthur’s knights, Prince Malagant, had long been jealous of the King’s glory. Now he found cause to quarrel with Arthur and left Camelot with hatred in his heart.” And exactly what caused Malagant to quarrel with the King? We never do find out why but I'd like to think it was because Arthur was one of those guys who double-dipped his potato chips.

 

“I will not follow a king with a poor party etiquette.”

The nasty Malagant (Ben Cross) has been making a nuisance of himself by burning down villages in Lyonesse, a small country ruled by Guinevere (Julia Ormond), which leads to her to going forward with an arranged marriage to King Arthur (Sean Connery), a marriage that is partly out of admiration for the king and partly for security against Malagant but also because she does love Arthur despite their 35-year age difference. While on route to Camelot Guinevere's carriage is ambushed by a group of Malagant’s soldiers, lucky for her a vagabond and skilled swordsman named Lancelot (Richard Gere) just so happened to be in the neighbourhood and he thwarts Malagant’s plan to kidnap her. After saving her from what was quickly escalating into an attempted rape Lancelot proceeds to hit on Guinevere because nothing sparks romance like sexual assault. Guinevere rightly slaps this asshole but his response to being slapped is to then forcibly kiss the woman in question and state, “I can tell when a woman wants me.”

 

An Officer and a Gentleman he is not.

After saving Guinevere a second time, when Malagant’s men kidnap her right from under Arthur’s nose, Lancelot is offered a knighthood and a seat at the Round Table but the only reason he takes the position is so that he can hang around Camelot and perv on Guinevere some more, which is this film's idea of a chivalrous hero for some reason. Then after a victorious battle against Malagant’s forces, Lancelot finally decides mooning after another man’s wife is probably not such a great idea and tells Guinevere he is leaving, which she then responds to with a tearful kiss. This tender moment is, of course, interrupted by Arthur and thus this version of the Arthurian myth, and the love triangle that would destroy a kingdom is ended over something as lame as a goodbye kiss. I’ve watched Hallmark Channel movies with more interesting love stories than what is on display here.

 

“Why has this script forsaken me?”

Stray Thoughts:

• Guinevere is normally portrayed as the daughter of King Leodegrance, who was the king of Cameliard, not Lyonesse. In fact, Lyonesse is the Arthurian country most associated with the story of Tristan and Iseult.
• We are first introduced to Lancelot as he challenges local peasants to some swordplay for fun and profit, but was it common for the average 6th Century peasants to have swords of their own?
• An automated gauntlet is set-up as some kind of pre-wedding festive game but padded suits or not the swing axes and swords would kill any contestant hit by them. Did these people consider maiming a good omen for a wedding?
• When King Arthur finally leads his men out into the field against Malagant he brings Guinevere along for no logical reason. I know she’s supposed to be this brave and strong woman but you don’t bloody well bring your queen into combat situations.
• Arthur has his men set up a fake encampment, full of empty tents and dummies to look like soldiers so as to trap Malagant’s forces. I guess this King Arthur was a fan of Blazing Saddles.
• Apparently, during a public trial all guards manning the castle walls and gates are given the day off because that is the only way to explain Malagant and his army sneaking into Camelot, in broad fucking daylight, and no one noticing.
• We get none of the magical elements of the Arthurian legend, with no Excalibur or Merlin in sight, but we do get a Camelot that looks like a Disney theme park.

 

Camelot, the dullest place on Earth.

The removal of the mythical magical elements of the Arthurian legend has always befuddled me.  Do movie execs think a more grounded version of a classic myth would be more palatable to modern audiences? If they wanted to make a simple medieval romance all they had to do was stop name-checking characters from the Arthurian myth because aside from the famous love triangle there is nothing that ties this particular story to Camelot, clearly, director Jerry Zucker and the folks over at Columbia Pictures wanted that name recognition so we’re stuck with a tepid bastardization version instead. But as bad an adaptation of the Arthurian myth First Knight is the worse aspect of this film is easily in the casting.

 

A tale as old as time as well as being as old as Sean Connery.

The nonsensical changes to the Arthurian legend pale in comparison to the complete lack of chemistry between the film’s leads. Hollywood making King Arthur and Guinevere into some sort of May-December romance is nothing new – most notably in the 1953 epic Sword of Lancelot – but Sean Connery and Julia Ormond not only had to deal with a 35-year age gap but also the fact that they have zero chemistry on screen, and all of their scenes together are painfully dull to watch. Yet their complete lack of spark pales in comparison to the absolute zero levels of charisma that Richard Gere brings to the show. Lancelot is supposed to be King Arthur’s best friend and greatest champion but the version portrayed by Gere is that of a complete cad and a bounder. He’s just some bum travelling the countryside making money off the peasant folk, that is when he’s not hitting on women that are betrothed to someone else. In the legend Lancelot du Luc was a French knight who joined King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table while in this movie he's certainly not French – thank god they didn't try and make Richard Gere fake a French accent – and though Gere is a fine actor it's safe to say that period piece movies are not his thing as he was never once convincing as a 6th-century resident.

 

I wonder what hair salon Lancelot uses.

The real crime here is that at two hours and fifteen minutes this movie feels three times as long, it’s just that boring. The battle scenes are barely interesting, the hero is about as likable as foot fungus and Sean Connery was clearly in paycheck mode throughout the film’s interminable running time. What’s interesting is that this isn’t even Sean Connery’s first foray into the Arthurian myth as he played the Green Knight in 1984’s Sword of the Valiant, and though that movie is a much worse entry than First Knight it still managed to be more entertaining.

Words like lukewarm, boring and tedious are not what one would normally associate with the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table but somehow Jerry Zucker managed to give us a bloated period piece with all the fun and excitement of those classic tales painfully excised.

Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004) – Review

With the first live-action Scooby-Doo movie pulling in $275 million worldwide a sequel was never in doubt and with director Raja Gosnell, screenwriter James Gunn and the rest of the cast back one could have expected more of the same this time out, sadly, this was a little too true as we don't find much in the way of improvements as this live-action installment still misses the mark more often than not.

In this movie, we find the members of Mystery Inc. being hailed as local heroes of their hometown of Coolsville with the grand opening of the Coolsonian Criminology Museum which commemorates their past solved cases with various monster costumes on display. The night does not go quite as planned as an evil masked figure appears and uses the reanimated Pterodactyl Ghost costume to steal two more of the exhibit’s costumes. This Doctor Doom knock-off crossed with the Phantom of the Opera announces to the Scooby gang that, “This time you will be the ones unmasked, as the buffoons you truly are,” and with Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby-Doo’s (Neil Fanning) incompetence leading to much of the museum’s exhibit being trashed things aren’t looking good for our heroes.

 

"I'll get you, my pretty, and your little CGI dog too!"

Local investigative reporter Heather Jasper Howe (Alicia Silverstone) immediately starts a smear campaign to discredit Mystery Incorporated, stating, “It's my job to unmask those who pretend to be who they're not.” Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is quick to point out that her agenda seems to align perfectly with what the Evil-Masked-Guy was stating, which moves Heather to the top of the suspect list, but then the Evil-Masked-Guy appears standing on the roof of the Coolsville museum and we all know a villain can’t be in two places at the same time.

 

Spoiler Alert: She is totally the villain behind the monsters being unleashed.

In the previous live-action movie there wasn’t much of an actual mystery for the Scooby gang to solve, it just had the “surprise” reveal that Scrappy-Doo was behind everything, but in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed writer James Gunn at least pretends there is an interest in giving us a good Scooby-Doo mystery. Unfortunately, most of the film’s running time is spent dealing with each of the gang’s existential crises, we have Daphne wondering if she is just a “pretty face” with nothing else to offer despite the fact that in the last movie she had already shown us she was a badass fighter and in this one she takes on the Ghost of the Black Knight and is able to figure out how to get the gang out of a locked cage by using the contents of her purse. It’s as if the film wants us to ignore the evidence before our own eyes to justify character development that had already been established.

Trivia Note: The Black Knight Ghost appeared in the very first episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in the episode titled “What a Night for a Knight.”

Daphne isn’t the only one having a personal crisis as we have Shaggy and Scooby-Doo coming to the startling realization that through their entire career as members of Mystery Incorporated they’ve been a couple of screw-ups – which means they aren’t only idiots but rather obtuse ones – and leads them to decide to solve the mystery on their won, and then we have Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.) who is losing his confidence as a team leader even to point where he considers himself to be a wimp, and finally we have Velma (Linda Cardellini) trying to change herself into more "glamorous, mysterious, adventurous jet-setter hot babe" in an attempt to try and get museum curator Patrick Wisely (Seth Green) to like her.

 

They do make an adorable couple.

Now, even though it’s clear to even most five-year-old viewers that Heather is the true villain of this piece we still have to introduce a few more suspects. Now, the first costume to come to life was that of Pterodactyl Ghost who was originally unmasked by the Scooby gang as that of mad scientist Jonathan Jacobo (Tim Blake Nelson), who was stealing money to further his research into creating real monsters, but as he had died years ago while trying to escape prison he gets removed from the suspect list…well, his body was never found so maybe keep him on the list. Then we have Jeremiah Wickles (Peter Boyle), the original Black Knight Ghost's portrayer and who just so happened to have been Jacobo’s cellmate and just newly released from prison, and finally, we have Velma’s love interest Patrick, whose personality seems a little unstable and is revealed to have a secret shine to Jonathon Jacobo. Why Patrick Wisely has a shrine to Jacobo or why it would be located under the lair of the Evil-Masked Guy is never explained, but this movie doesn’t really have time to make sense, they have a mystery to solve. And just who is the culprit hell-bent on destroying the Scooby gang?

 

The Evil-Masked-Guy is…Jonathan Jacobo, the original Pterodactyl Ghost.

Wait…what? That’s right folks, the guilty party is none other than a character we were told was dead earlier in the film - but didn’t I state earlier in this review that Heather Howe was this movie’s villain, so how could it be Jacobo? Well, this movie uses the double unmasking joke that has been used a half-a-dozen times throughout Scooby's history. The Evil-Masked-Guy is first exposed to be Heather but then a second mask is pulled off to reveal that Dr. Jonathan Jacobo and Heather Howe are one and the same person and that her cameraman Ned (Zahf Paroo), who we were barely introduced to had but had time to don the Evil-Masked-Guy costume to appear on the roof of the museum to give Heather a perfect alibi.  Jacobo would have been better off investing his technology into possible military applications rather than obsessing over a bunch of kids and their dumb dog.

Note: Jacobo’s ability to create real ghosts and yet still be just a guy in a mask makes him a unique villain.

Stray Observations:

• Mystery Incorporated is seen to have a tricked out crime-solving headquarters but we’ve still never seen them get paid for solving a crime. Is this whole thing being funded by Daphne’s rich family?
• Velma being afraid of dating is a character trait that comes out of the blue in this movie, even in the previous live-action film Velma had no problem talking to guys.
• Scooby and Shaggy sing Frank Sinatra’s "Strangers in the Night” a song that features the improvised scat lyrics, "Scoo-bee-doo-bee-doo" which was the original inspiration of Scooby-Doo’s name.
• The “Faux Ghost” bar is a hangout for Mystery Inc.’s unmasked villains which could be a nod to “Noonan’s Bar” in Gotham City where many of Batman’s villains hang out.
• This being a Raja Gosnell movie we are, of course, subjected to a terrible musical number.
• Daphne trying to karate kick the 10,000 Volt Ghost has to be one the dumbest of moments in this movie, there is being a badass and then there’s being a jackass.
• The idea of a hot Velma briefly seen in the previous movie is amped up in this installment.

 

“Jinkies!”

The biggest problem I had with Scooby-Doo2: Monsters Unleashed was the complete unnecessary moments of an identity crisis amongst the Scooby gang, in the last film we already had the drama of them breaking up and having to discover how to be a team again so we certainly didn’t need more character strife as depicted here.  The first live-action movie could be considered a light-hearted parody of the Scooby-Doo cartoons – a bit too light-hearted and where the dream of an R-Rated Scooby-Doo movie died – but it at least tried to poke a little fun at the tropes of the original cartoon while this movie was more of a case of “Remember that episode?” without much else going on, relying heavily on the nostalgia of the original cartoon instead of trying something new.

 

We do get an occasional cool moment, but that's about it.

The returning cast all do fine and with no earthshattering performances but the film gets major points taken away for completely wasting Tim Blake Nelson. Why even cast such a great actor if you're only going to give him one bloody line of dialogue?  There was to be a sequel to Scooby-Doo2: Monsters Unleashed, with James Gunn on board to write and direct, but the box office returns were not good enough to greenlight a third film and thus the subsequent live-action endeavours have all been made-for-television.

Note: I will admit that it was nice seeing several of the classic Scooby-Doo ghosts being brought to life but the special effects on display to bring them to life were not all that impressive.