Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! (2020) – Review

The Scooby gang have tackled a variety of ghost and goblins over the years, albeit mostly it was some dude in a mask but the point still stands, yet surprisingly not all that many of their mysteries revolved around the spookiest day of the year and with Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! we not only find the gang trying to celebrate the holiday in their hometown of Crystal Cove they also encounter The Scarecrow, one of DC comics classic villains, so what could go wrong?

The movie begins with your standard cold open, with the “Mystery of the Haunted Scarecrow” already in progress, where we find the Scooby gang working undercover on Elvira Mistress of the Dark’s Halloween parade float, but when Mystery Incorporated puts their trap into motion, well, to be more accurate an app on Fred’s cellphone, we get the big reveal that the “Haunted Scarecrow” was none other than the infamous supervillain The Scarecrow aka Dr. Johnathan Crane (Dwight Schultz), who had recently escaped from Arkham Asylum and now threatens our heroes with drones armed with his patented fear gas.  Luckily for everyone involved Shaggy’s (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby-Doo’s (Frank Welker) love for holiday gives them the ability to shoot drones out of the sky with well-aimed Halloween candy, spitting the stuff at the drones with anti-aircraft gun precision, but one must ask, “Where the hell is Batman?”

“He’s at home, washing his tights!”

The lack of the Dark Knight in this mystery is rather odd, what with the fact that Batman has crossed paths with the Scooby gang on multiple occasions, yet in a mystery that has one of his most notorious rogues at the center of things not only is the cape crusader missing but he’s not even mentioned. I’m totally cool with Batman not solving this caper but couldn’t he have at least shown up for a cameo, or does Batman not exist in this particular Scooby-Doo continuity?  The interesting thing here is that while being carted away by the authorities, Crane warns Velma (Kate Micucci) that “I may be the one in chains but we are both in the same trap” and before you can say “Ruh Roh” fear gas is mixing with some spilled toxic waste, which then runs into a nearby pumpkin patch, where it causes pumpkins to mutate into horrifying Jackal-Lanterns that then proceed to terrorize the townsfolk of Crystal Cove.

I’d have loved it if the “Silver Shamrock” jingle started to play at this point.

A key thing to take note of here is that there really isn’t much of a mystery to be found within the eighty-minute running-time of Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo as we are given no suspects and the big final reveal comes completely out of left field.  It turns out that the culprit is the town’s Sheriff (David Herman) who is actually a man named Culter Toe, the head of a tech company that made the drones used to create the Jackal-Lanterns, but why does this man have a hard-on for our heroes and Crystal Cove?  Well, it seems he also had a history with Mystery Incorporated as years ago he was the man behind the mystery of the “Trash Monster of Scranton” – some off-camera adventure we get to see in a flashback – and after being released from jail he began to disguise himself as a local Sheriff so as to drive the gang out of business, which would then have allowed him free reign to mine the valuable lithium crystals located beneath Crystal Cove.  Now, one must admit that’s a pretty big info-dump for your last act reveal yet the idea of a villain pretending to be a Sheriff to discourage the Scooby gang from crime-solving was pretty ingenious it’s just too bad this clever pay-off was part of a rather lacklustre Scooby adventure.

The smell is from the script, not the Trash Monster.

In many of the Scooby-Doo adventures, the villain’s technology on display are complete and utter cheats, pterodactyl hang-gliders and the like, and Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! is no different as the “Jackal-Lanterns” as depicted here are clearly monsters, having legs and tentacles with the ability to bite and capture their prey, and thus they are certainly not some lightweight drone with four propellers as revealed at the film’s conclusion. Of course, this is a Scooby-Doo cartoon and absurd villain plots are what we’ve come to see but where this movie really failed was in its very story structure, we can forgive ludicrous elements if the whole hangs together.  In this outing, we have the Scooby gang “saving” the town from The Scarecrow, followed by “real” pumpkin monsters attacking the town but, sadly, the bulk of the movie is taken up by a rather boring car chase with our heroes fleeing for their lives from the vehicles being operated by the Jackal-Lanterns, which, once again, is something a drone inside a pumpkin would not be capable of bloody well doing!

“Scoob, I call bullshit on this entire endeavour.”

Stray Observation:

• A grown-up Red Herring from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo can be seen attending the Halloween Parade.
• One of the parade floats is from “Frankenstein Jr. and the Incredibles!” which means maybe someday we will get a proper crossover with that show.
• The Scooby gang had their first “encounter” with Elvira Mistress of the Dark in Return to Zombie Island.
• Daphne is given a rather bizarre personality makeover that has her going total Single White Female with her attempt at becoming Elvira.
• Daphne denies having a circus history despite her time as a clown in Big Top Scooby-Doo!
• Why is Velma so upset that she wrongly accused the Scarecrow of the crime? Not only is he an escapee from Arkham Asylum but did she also forget that once he was caught he instigated a failsafe program that would have covered the whole town with his fear gas?
• Eating Scooby Snacks apparently allows you to mind-meld. Who knew?
• Fred’s trap obsession reaches its peak when he goes full-on Arnie from The Predator when the Mystery Machine is destroyed.

“If it bleeds we can kill it.”

The film’s ridiculous plot and the shoddy story structure were certainly a problem but Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! makes a further misstep with this being another entry that takes Velma in the direction of being the gang’s resident skeptic, thus denying the existence of any previous adventure where actual supernatural creatures were involved, and I hate this. This was most painful in Return to Zombie Island but it’s no better here and made worse by also having Velma act needless cruel towards Shaggy and Scooby and also by stating such nonsensical lines as “I’m not afraid of you, Crane, fear is an illogical reaction to an imagined threat.” That is not what fear is, did Velma not take any psyche courses while in school? Fear is a necessary emotion as it alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological, and it exists to keep one safe. With this moronic psychobabble, the movie tries to give Velma some kind of character arc where she discovers it was her fear of being wrong that was the problem, seriously, that’s the big reveal in this movie.

Character assassination, thy name is Velma.

Did I mention that our heroes get help from Bill Nye the Science Guy? Having appeared in an episode of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who I guess the writers thought it’d be fun to use him again and thus they created a subplot where Bill Nye has created a high-tech Mystery Machine after the original vehicle was damaged.  To say this inclusion was unnecessary and distracting would be a vast understatement. His addition to the story is guilty of being both annoying as well as highlighting the idiocy of the Scooby gang – once again Fred (Frank Welker) is depicted as a trifle thick, as well as being insanely obsessed with both the Mystery Machine, while Daphne’s (Grey Griffin) behaviour verges on the truly bizarre with her obsession over Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) and her out-of-the-blue spouting of old cliché catchphrases, which is just weird, but all that could be overlooked if the story itself had made a lick of sense or at least wasn’t so bloody tiresome. Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! isn’t the worst of the Direct-to-Video Scooby-Doo movies and the animation on display is fairly decent, but this entry is definitely guilty of wasting a great member of Batman’s rogues’ gallery and an even poorer treatment of the Scooby gang.

You can find all my reviews of the various Scooby-Doo shows and movies collected here: The Wonderful World of Scooby-Doo.