Most Scooby-Doo films are just alright. They are often glorified hour-long episodes of the series, or Archie Comics-style cameo machines. But starting in 1998 and ending in 2003, there was a run of good-to-great straight-to-VHS films, Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island (1998), Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost (1999), Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders (2000), Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase (2001), and Scooby-Doo and the Legend of the Vampire (2003). But it was Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island that revitalized the franchise, that retains my pick for the best Mystery Inc. film around, and that debuted on Blu-ray this month. The worst Scooby-Doo film must be Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island (2019), which the gods punished me with for this review, and is attached to the Blu-ray as a way to kick mankind while it’s down during this time of global crisis.
Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island set off the mid-2000’s cultural revival of America’s favorite talking dog, leading to What’s New Scooby-Doo? hitting TV sets in 2002 and the James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Slither) penned Scooby-Doo live-action film on the silver screen that same year. That film is important to talk about, because its hook was that the disbanded Mystery Inc. were reunited in early adulthood on a trip to a remote island where they encountered their first real monsters. Besides both films ignoring the previous times that Scooby, Shaggy, and Daphne encountered real ghosts and ghouls in the ‘80s, Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island also shared the same core plot, solidifying the most beloved Scooby-Doo story template. Even the best of the TV shows, Mystery Inc. (2010-2013), is a Twin Peaks (1990-1991)-ish twist on that idea.
This enduring power of Scooby-Doo is its melancholic pairing of loss of innocence with demystification through humor. It’s a crime show for children, but instead of focusing on racialized ideas of “violent” crime like gang crime, murder, or assault like adult crime shows do, it focuses on white collar crime. Inheritance fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, tax evasion, insurance fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, grand larceny, these are crimes that men dressed as monsters have been committing on Saturday mornings for decades. The inversion at the heart of the best Scooby-Doo stories is to tell the children you’ve been teaching “there’s no monster under the bed, just bad men” that there are things you will never understand that keep you just as sleepless as any haunted diving suit. These are important lessons for children, and the emotional maps they create within us are still with us as adults, which is the difference between art you revisit for comfort and art you revisit out of nostalgia for youth.
Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island should have the title of “cable classic” that so many films like Heat (1995) or Rudy (1993) enjoy thanks to the FX channel. The thematic conclusion of the era of Doo that it started, Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase was a VHS tape I ran into the ground growing up, but I didn’t need to own Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island because I was able to catch it on Cartoon Network dozens of times. The shock of its zombies and cat people being real is a feeling that I embarrassingly remember every time I encounter something surreal and evil in real life. Death, cruelty, exploitation, a small part of my heart’s understanding of what it feels to witness them comes from the realization that the pirate’s oppression of the cat people turned them into oppressors themselves. It’s an exceptionally small part, but it’s there. And that’s why the modern IP-mining “sequel” to the film decides to contradict and undercut every decision the film ever made for no reason.
I will not mince words. Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island is the second worst film I have ever seen, beaten only by my previously reviewed Assassin Club (2023). Two weeks ago, I walked into my younger sister’s messy room and briefly stepped on one of her drawings, and in that moment there was more artistic integrity beneath my heel than there is in that entire “screenplay.” But to attribute words like “sequel” and “screenplay” to this film is to degrade the terms themselves. There are good voice performances from the Mystery Inc. cast and 4-5 great, quick shots where the animators snuck some quality work past the management of Warner Brothers-Discovery. It’s not entirely devoid of artistry, but it is devoid of merit. I am going to spoil it for you, and you will thank me for saving you the time.
In Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island, they retcon the first film so that instead of being young adults, they were teenagers. Nationally syndicated TV host Daphne Blake and her producer Fred Jones were actually interns. Her national TV show was a “school project,” it turns out. Velma considers the original mystery “unsolved” because she doesn’t believe magic is real, even though her life force was drained from her body and she watched magic cat people disintegrate. The one surviving islander is never mentioned, but an improv group is dressed up as the other people who tried to kill the gang before, but they are not recognized. The whole thing is an attempt to trick the gang into starring in a hidden camera horror movie. Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island is working overtime to pretend that actually, the cat people weren’t real, and everything was a trick, but also, at the last minute, maybe it wasn’t? While the first film had a romantic score evocative of road trips and Americana, this bayou-set film is scored by what feels like a racist parody of steel-drum, Southern-Pacific “island” music. The whole time. There’s a romantic subplot between Fred and a van that looks like the Mystery Machine. The gang spends the majority of the film pretending there is no mystery, only to reverse course without a dramatic beat. Also, the way movies work in this film? Not how movies work, but of course, the film is trying to convince you that no one making it knows how movies work, because then they’d be off the hook.
It’s a film that resents the genuinely beloved and popular film that it’s a sequel to. It’s not ineptitude, because directors Ethan Spaulding (Son of Batman, Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur) and Cecilia Aranovich (Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special, Scooby-Doo! And Krypto, Too!) and writer Jeremy Adams (Batman: Son of the Dragon, Justice Society World War II) know how to turn in a solid, straight to DVD animated film. They’ve done it dozens of times. It is simply an astonishingly cynical act of corporate strategy, so much so that I’d tell you to buy the box and throw away disc 2, but they thought of that and crammed them onto the same one so you’ll be stuck with it forever. My condolences.
Available on Blu-ray May 7th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures Scooby-Doo! On Zombie Island or Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island webpage.
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Categories: Home Release, Recommendation
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