Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur (2011) – Review

What could be scarier than a rampaging dinosaur? Why, a rampaging ghost dinosaur of course, which brings us to the sixteenth direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie, Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur. This particular outing is more action-comedy driven than many of the other Scooby-Doo movies, focusing on having bigger action set-pieces rather than scary atmospheric ones, but the result is still a rather fun entry.

The movie opens with a visit to the local hospital, where we find a perpetually screaming Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) being examined by the ER doctor. We learn from the gang that they’d been spending “Just a normal evening, investigating an old mansion being haunted by phantom Naval officers,” when poor Shaggy got trapped in a wardrobe with a gaggle of ghosts. They were, of course, just a bunch of monster puppets being used by a couple of shady realtors trying to make the owners sell cheap, but it was enough to drive poor Shaggy into a non-stop screaming catatonic state.

I could see this breaking anybody, let alone someone like Shaggy.

After getting x-rayed, the doctor diagnoses Shaggy with Acute-Threat-Avoidance-Hypertrophy Disorder, “A very rare form of overreaction to fear stimuli that affect fewer than one in ten million,” and that Shaggy will now have to avoid anything even remotely scary, “So, no more ghost hunting, crime-busting or mystery-solving shenanigans.” The doctor even forbids Shaggy from riding in the Mystery Machine. Things look pretty dire for Mystery Incorporated, though why they are taking such information seriously when it comes from an ER doctor, one who uses an x-ray machine for the diagnosis of a mental issue, and not a psychiatrist, which is the real mystery here. Lucky for the Scooby gang, it turns out Fred (Frank Welker) is failing his science class — Fred’s teacher not appreciating becoming a trap subject in his attempt to demonstrate Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion — so the gang takes a trip to New Mexico to visit a new resort in La Serena, a town certified by the U.S. Bureau of Supernatural Forces to be the “Least haunted town in America,” a town that also just so happens to be right next to a paleontological dig that could land Fred those extra credits he needs to pass his course. Unfortunately, faster than you can say “Scooby Snacks,” the glowing monstrosity known as “The Phantosaur” is roaring across the desert landscape and threatening Shaggy’s mental health even further. But what exactly is a Phantosaur?

The Phantosaur Legend: With Spanish Conquistadors murdering and pillaging across the New World, the shaman of a local tribe of Native Americans tried to call forth the most powerful spirit in the land to drive the invaders away, but instead of getting the spirit of a mountain lion or a bear, he got something much more ancient, a beast too powerful to be controlled, one that ended up driving off those it was called to protect.

Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur checks off most of the boxes for your standard Scooby-Doo mystery: the gang travels to some far-off location, Shaggy and Scooby eat tons of food and act like goofballs, then a mystery will soon enfold and a bunch of suspects will be trotted out. But on this particular excursion, a pretty nice wrinkle is thrown into the mix … extra villains! And who could that person or persons unknown be who has unleashed a prehistoric monster ghost? Could it be Mr. Hubley (Fred Willard), the owner of La Serena Spa in an attempt to get the locals to sell their land to extend his spa? What about graduate student Winsor (Matthew Gray Gubler), who through working as a paleontology aid to Professor Svankmajer (Finola Hughes), his knowledge of computer graphics puts him in the running for creating a prehistoric menace. Then there is Ms. Deitch (Gwendoline Yeo) and Mr. Babbit (Michael Gough) who work for a mining company that has discovered a vein of silver but can’t work the mine due to Professor Svankmajer’s dig.

Who wants to put money on it being the mining company?

The gang quickly figures out who is behind the rampaging dinosaur — in record time even — as they uncover Deitch and Babbit’s van being used to control the two animatronic dinosaurs, which they had taken from a real-life dinosaur exhibit their company sponsored. But hold the phone, there is a more cretaceous crime in the wings. Moments after the police cart off Deitch and Babbit, our heroes find themselves being chased through the resort by a pack of velociraptors — through a kitchen in a clear homage to Spielberg’s Jurassic Park — and soon the entire town is being besieged by a fire-breathing Phantosaur.

Eat your heart out, Godzilla!

Could this truly be the legendary Phantosaur? Of course not! The gang exposes the raptors as being grad students in costumes that they stole from that same real-life dinosaur exhibit where Deitch and Babbit got their animatronic dinosaur, and the Fiery Phantosaur itself was a 3-D projected monster created by Winsor, with stolen hologram tech from the resort and operated by himself and Professor Svankmajer. This was all created to drive the townspeople away so that they could smuggle away a priceless crystallized Allosaurus they found in the caverns below La Serena. So with Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur, we get two groups of criminals working independently of each other, with separate motives and techniques to create a ghost dinosaur, making this a rather unique Scooby-Doo mystery, but that still isn’t what makes this movie really stand out. Not only does this film have two criminal conspiracies on hand, but it also has two subplots. First, we have Velma (Mindy Cohn) falling in love with fellow nerd Winsor — her mystery-solving skills derailed by this adolescent crush — and then we have Shaggy, in an attempt to cure his cowardice, being hypnotized by Hubley’s hologram projector into becoming a fearless and unstoppable badass whenever he hears the word “bad,” and then he switches back to normal when he hears it again.

Note: Shaggy wipes out an entire motorcycle gang while in this hypnotized state, in one of the most awesome action scenes in a Scooby-Doo movie.

Much of the film’s run-time is spent exploring Shaggy’s hypnotized badassery, making the ghost dinosaur mystery very much a secondary element, even more, tertiary when you throw in the time spent with Velma’s love interest, thus making Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur is rather thin on the mystery side of things but heavier on the comic relief. With so much of the movie focusing on Shaggy and Velma and their adventures — Shaggy gets into an extended motorcycle race with the biker gang’s leader and Velma tries for an “extreme” makeover before going on a date with Winsor — any sense of danger or scares is pretty much non-existent. Now, I don’t expect chills and thrills at every turn with my Scooby-Doo movies, but ghost-hunting and mystery-solving shenanigans really got the short shrift this time out.

Stray Observations:

• To follow the doctor’s orders of not allowing Shaggy into The Mystery Machine, Fred simply repaints it as The Mustard Machine.
• Fred continues to use a snarky GPS (John DiMaggio), which this time sends them on detours to five chilli joints, an all-night bowling alley, a meteor crater, and a tattoo parlour.
• Shaggy switching back and forth between being a badass fighter and a cowardly idiot is a clear nod to the Danny Kaye film The Court Jester.
• The local theatre is showing two classic Ray Harryhausen dinosaur films, The Valley of Gwangi and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
• Once again we get cheats on the show’s “monsters” as the cable-controlled Phantosaur could not have been operated in such a fashion — rampaging around while connected to the control van being quite impossible — and the grad students in raptor costumes were somehow able to run as fast as The Mystery Machine.
• We learn that Daphne (Grey Griffin) learned to ride a motorcycle at the age of five.

Note: Watching all the various incarnations of the Scooby-Doo shows and movies, one thing has become perfectly clear: the Scooby gang had the most neglectful parents in the history of television.

Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur was a nice entry in the Scooby-Doo movie series, though not as frightening as such entries as Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island or Camp Scare, nor does it have as compelling a mystery as the likes of Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, but regardless of any of this, we still end up with a very fun movie. The number of laughs we get makes up for any lack in the overall mystery category, and it gives us a Scooby-Doo movie that will entertain young and old alike.

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