Scooby-Doo in Where’s My Mummy? (2005) – Review

Being chased by ancient mummies is nothing new to the Scooby Gang, having encountered such bandaged monstrosities in the original series episode titled “Scooby-Doo and a Mummy, Too,” and more recently in the episode “Mummy Scares Best” from the 2002 to 2006 series What’s New Scooby-Doo? But what Scooby-Doo in Where’s My Mummy? mostly owes its existence to, would be the Brendan Fraser version of The Mummy — the producers of this animated movie even went so far as to cast Oded Fehr in a role almost identical to the one he played in that particular adventure film.

The movie opens with a history lesson — narrated by Cleopatra (Virginia Madsen) herself — where we learn that after the Romans sacked Alexandria, Cleopatra fled down the Nile, vowing that she would protect the ancient treasures of her people, which entailed hiding them in a secret tomb beneath the Great Sphinx. She informs us that, “Within this tomb was an impenetrable maze of traps and secret dangers, forever guarded by an ancient horror. The army of the undead, a thousand mummified warriors awaiting the call to rise from the grave and defend Egypt’s last great treasure,” and then to top it off, she invokes the gods, “Under the golden crown of Isis I cast my curse, the Curse of Cleopatra, let it be written!”

Does this mean marrying Caesar was off the table?

Historical Note: Now, one can’t be expected to find much historical veracity in a Scooby-Doo movie, but this film takes historical ignorance to a whole new level. Though the burning of the Egyptian Library of Alexandria was Caesar’s fault, it was accidental, and though it was done during the siege against Cleopatra’s younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, the Romans were actually in support of Cleopatra over her brother. Yet this movie fails to even mention the likes of Caesar or Mark Antony, two key figures in Cleopatra’s life, and she certainly wasn’t known for building elaborate booby-trap-laden tombs, laying nasty curses, or even creating armies of the undead. Mores the pity.

This looks like a job for Ash Williams.

We then jump ahead a few centuries to find Velma (Mindy Cohn) working as an archaeologist for Prince Omar (Ajay Naidu) on his restoration project of the Great Sphinx, and it’s while working on the Sphinx that she uncovers an ancient necklace that reveals the hidden entrance to the tomb of Queen Cleopatra. And before you can say “Jinkies,” the rest of the Scooby gang arrives for a surprise visit — in a scene that kind of implies that Fred (Frank Welker) drove all the way to Egypt via The Mystery Machine — but the group is then shocked to find that Velma is reticent to let the gang investigate this latest mystery, citing it’s “too dangerous.” This is very uncharacteristic of Velma “We have a mystery to solve” Dinkley. Unfortunately, Velma doesn’t have much time to make her case before a tomb-raiding treasure hunter named Dr. Amelia Von Butch (Christine Baranski) arrives with a mercenary team of G.I. Joe rejects.

Lara Croft’s lawyers will be in touch.

This is when things get messy. Von Butch and her gang march everyone down under the Sphinx where she quickly sets an explosive off to open the tomb, unleashing a curse made by Cleopatra: “A curse against those that defile this sacred tomb of the pharaohs. The Nile will fall and the desert will rise, the army of the undead will awaken, and all who enter will be turned to stone.” We’re talking about your basic ancient Egyptian curse. Von Butch scoffs at the curse, but moments later, after being separated by the group, Prince Omar is found to have been turned to stone. It looks like we have a mystery on our hands.  Now, is there actually some credence to the Curse of Cleopatra, or could some person or persons unknown be pulling off an elaborate hoax? Only time will tell.

What a petrifying mystery.

Where’s My Mummy? is a Scooby-Doo movie that is simply chock full of suspects, but the upfront criminality of Dr. Amelia Von Butch changes the show’s usual dynamic somewhat. It’s quite apparent that Von Butch can’t be behind “Cleopatra’s Curse,” because everything that occurs is against her own best interests, with legions of mummies trying to stop her at every turn, so who could be behind this Egyptian puzzle? When the gang first arrived, they ran into reality show host Rock Rivers (Jeremy Piven), whose show “Fear Facers” was cancelled after it was discovered that he’d faked footage, so could he be back at it again, creating this elaborate hoax to get his show back on the air? Then we have the mysterious Egyptian nomad Amahl Ali Akbar (Oded Fehr), who keeps showing up in the nick of time; could his enigmatic helpfulness just be a clever ruse? And then there is Hotep (Ron Perlman), the leader of an underground hidden Egyptian city that Scooby and Shaggy (Casey Kasem) stumbled upon while fleeing the army of the undead, a city of people who have given up the modern world for the ancient one, and did I mention that Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker) is mistaken for the returning pharaoh Ascoobis?

Scooby-Doo tends to fulfill a lot of prophecies.

It’s this “Lost City” element of the movie that just doesn’t work; it’s a side quest that is clearly there simply to pad out the film’s run-time — important because this movie actually had a limited theatrically release — and when Hotep is revealed to be a brilliant civil engineer named Armin Granger, who has been illegally damming the Nile River for his grand underground city, it basically comes across as a mini-mystery that Shaggy gets to solve on his own — which in itself is a nice little twist — but it has no real impact on the larger mystery pertaining to Cleopatra and her curse.

We do get a fun fight against a giant Scorpion.

Stray Observations:

• The songs that appear in this movie try really hard to sound like Alan Menken’s song from Disney’s Aladdin.
• During one chase sequence, Shaggy and Scooby take off on a flying carpet. That’s not Egyptian mythology, that’s Arabian you stupid hacks!
• When the Scooby gang first hooked up with Amahl Ali Akbar, they discovered that the Nile had dried up; this is pretty much impossible — the Nile is one of the largest rivers in the world, and if it had suddenly dried up, it would have devastated much of the continent, yet no one even bothers to investigate such a calamity.
• The Nile drying up also fits the part of the curse “The Nile will fall,” but we discover that it was Armin Granger who had diverted the Nile for his own purposes, and thus had nothing to do with Cleopatra’s curse, so that’s a clue. Also, even a fraction of the Nile’s volume would have overflowed Armin’s stupid Egyptian utopia.
• Our heroes come across a large catacomb full of Cleopatra’s mummified dead, and Daphne (Grey Griffin) notes that these mummies looked undisturbed, covered in a century’s worth of dust, so it clearly wasn’t them chasing the gang up and down the catacombs. So there’s another clue.
• Velma is turned to stone just like Prince Omar, with that ancient Egyptian necklace still around her neck. Did this show just kill Velma?
• Cleopatra herself shows up, demanding that the infidels leave the tomb, and she then unleashes a plague of locusts. She must have been a fan of the Old Testament God … or more likely the Brendan Fraser Mummy movie.

Cleopatra in all her mummified glory.

The movie concludes with a big battle between Cleopatra’s undead army and the people from the hidden city, who are now led by Daphne in a Cleopatra disguise of her own, all while Von Butch is sneaking into the chamber of Cleopatra to steal the priceless crown, which then causes the Nile River to burst through the tomb, flushing out all of its riches. Everyone manages to barely escape with their lives, which also includes an unconscious and waterlogged Cleopatra, and this leads to the grand unmasking.

“Velma?”

Turns out that Velma had planned the whole hoax, along with Prince Omar, in the hopes of scaring away tomb robbers. They’d used quick-drying cement to make copies of themselves to pass off as victims of “the curse,” and Velma was able to create the swarm of locusts because she’d learned to breed them in her previous year’s science class — obviously not caring what a swarm of locust would do to the ecology of the region — and Omar and his workers became Cleopatra’s undead army. What doesn’t work is the fact that Velma kept her friends in the dark; letting them think she had been turned to stone, that’s just a dick move. Velma’s reasoning of “I knew it would be dangerous and I didn’t want any of you to get hurt,” just doesn’t wash, not when you consider the amount of peril the Scooby gang faces on a routine basis, and that she was surprised her friends would try to rescue her is all kinds of bullshit.

The Scooby Gang calls this kind of threat a Tuesday.

Velma being behind the hoax is a surprising reveal that makes Where’s My Mummy? a unique entry in the history of Scooby-Doo — it even caught me off-guard — but aside from that twist, there wasn’t much originality on hand (even the turning “victims” into stone gimmick was used in the episode “Scooby-Doo and a Mummy, Too” and everything else was borrowed from the Brendan Fraser movie). On the plus side, it really does have a fantastic supporting voice cast, with the likes of Virginia Madsen, Christine Baranski, Jeremy Piven, Ron Perlman, and Oded Fehr all giving it their best. That is one star-studded cast.

Final Observation: Let us consider the Scooby-Doo Disguise Trope.

One of the standard tropes in the Scooby-Doo series is when Shaggy and Scooby will put on some form of disguise to fool the monster, such as a hairstylist or chef — but being the monsters are nine times out of ten a guy in a mask, why would they react like the stupid beasts they are pretending to be? This trope is more egregious here as Cleopatra is bloody Velma; how could she be fooled by this? Has the desert sun poached her brain? But the worst example of this is when Shaggy and Scooby dress up like female mummies to distract the undead army, and this somehow works.

Why would Omar’s workers become lovestruck?

I guess it’s a case of cartoon logic, and something not to be questioned, and overall this places Where’s My Mummy? solidly in the middle of the pack when considering Scooby-Doo direct-to-video movies; it’s not a great entry, as the script is vastly flawed with logic gaps that will hurt your brain if you think about them, but as a whole, it was still entertaining and thus worth checking out.

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