Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy Blu-ray Movie Review

Franken-sleepy...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown August 8, 2014

For a movie that spends so much time referencing classic episodes of the original Scooby-Doo cartoon, Frankencreepy lumbers and lurches into the future with all the grace of an animated corpse. The Mystery Inc. gang -- once and I hope still beloved -- have been reduced to at-times unlikable caricatures of themselves (particularly Fred and Daphne), undone by meta-satire and generational apologies that wear out their welcome very, very fast. It doesn't help that the central mystery is a jumble of ideas too convoluted for its own good, or that jokes and gags are repeated ad nauseum (Fred's love of his van being the only one that works). Worse, little proves fresh or all that funny... if, that is, you've been hanging around with Scoob for a few decades. My son was entertained, so that's a plus. I was not. He laughed from start to finish. I chuckled here and there. He couldn't peel his eyes off the screen. I spent more time checking my watch and wishing for the grand days of pure, unadulterated Scooby-Doo; untouched by the 21st century, untarnished by irritating YouTube and social media trends, and confident enough in its formula to keep things simple. Smart? Sure. Clever? Preferably. But simple.

Velma (voiced by Mindy Cohn) discovers she's inherited her great-great-uncle Dr. Von Dinkenstein’s cursed castle in the terrifying town of Transylvania… Pennsylvania. But just as her Mystery Inc. friends -- Fred (Frank Welker), Daphne (Grey DeLisle), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby-Doo (Welker) -- persuade her to claim her inheritance, the ghost of Dinkenstein Castle blows up the Mystery Machine as a warning. The crew springs back into action, but this time it's personal. Who's responsible for the Dinkenstein monster? What family secret has Velma been hiding? Will Fred recover from the loss of his beloved Mystery Machine? Can any helpless snack survive Scooby and Shaggy's monster-sized appetites?

The entire premise of Frankencreepy revolves around pushing Mystery Inc.'s meddling kids out of their comfort zones. Fred loses the Mystery Machine and becomes a shell of his former self. Daphne *gasp* gains weight, much to her horror. Velma goes full-on super-villain, resurrecting a creature using her great-great-uncle's journal. Shaggy and Scooby suddenly become fearless, which lands them in even hotter water than usual. All well and good... if the writing is solid, the story is engaging, and there's an endgame worth playing. There isn't, other than setting up the slow, drawn-out, feature-length reveal of the movie's masked menace. (Which most Scooby-Doo veterans and junior exposition detectives will figure out long before Dinkenstein's ghost rears its head.) Instead, everything you love about the franchise is tossed to the curb, reworked or tinkered with for the sake of making fun of its characters. Why? Why must everything be flipped on its head? Fred can't just be a leader, he's a bossy jerk. Dapne can't just be the cute chick, she has to be shallow and obsessed with her image. Velma can't just be the bookworm, she has to erupt, go evil and turn on her friends. It's all explained, of course. All part of the mystery. Was there ever any doubt? But it doesn't make for a very enjoyable ride along the way.

And yet my mind keeps coming back to the look on my son's face. All grins and giggles. As parents and movie lovers, it's our job to help refine our children's cinematic palates. But there's something to be said for good, harmless fun. Frankencreepy didn't do it for me, and I strongly suspect it won't appeal all that much to the majority of seasoned Scooby-Doo fans. Kids, though, aren't cursed with a critical eye. That develops much later. It's important to wean children off bad movies as early as possible, yeah. But it's also a balancing act. Deprive them of too much cringe-inducing animated misfires and you rob them of the joy of building their own personal library of go-to age-appropriate flicks; movies they'll revisit one day only to shake their heads and ask, "what was I thinking back then?" That nostalgia you and I so treasure? It clawed and crawled its way out of the primordial ooze of movies our parents hated. So loathe Frankencreepy all you want. You can have a blast watching your kids have a blast. I swear. It works. You'll find yourself laughing at things that aren't that funny. Smiling at things that probably deserve scowls. Forgiving a film of flaws your children aren't old enough to notice anyway.

Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy features a frightfully fun 1080p/AVC-encoded video presentation brimming with bold, eye-popping splashes of color, vibrant contrast and rich, inky black levels. Detail is remarkable, with thick, crisply defined line art, fairly seamless CG elements, well-resolved background textures and perfectly preserved touches straight from the animators' pens. (Or computers, as it were.) The only real issue is banding, and it's extremely minor. It pops up every now and then, but it isn't a severe problem by any means. It not only traces back to the source animation (rather than Warner's encode), it isn't nearly as prevalent as it is in other Scooby-Doo Blu-ray releases. I'd even go so far as to call this the movie series' most impressive presentation to date. Better still, macroblocking, aliasing, ringing, noise and other issues are nowhere to be found, meaning the entire movie boasts a sharp, clean sheen that stays true to the animators' intentions.

Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Frankencreepy's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track isn't as impressive as its video presentation, but it also isn't dead on arrival. Not even close. LFE output is strong and assertive, with some nice oomph injected into various scares, monster roars, explosions and other weighty effects. The rear speakers create a relatively inviting soundfield as well, with decent directionality and transparent pans, and voices are intelligible and carefully prioritized from beginning to end, even when the chaos of a creepy ghost chase dominates the proceedings. I wasn't blown away, but I was quite pleased with the results.

Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray edition of Frankencreepy includes two episodes from the classic Scooby-Doo cartoon series -- "A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts" and "To Switch a Witch" -- both presented in standard definition.

Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are times that I realize just how old I'm getting. Thirty-six isn't old, I suppose, but it's old enough to make it harder and harder to enjoy the big dumb harmless fun of a kid's movie like Frakencreepy. I love Scooby-Doo, I do. Sometimes modern Doo is almost as good as classic Doo. Sometimes not. Frankencreepy gets more wrong than it does right, and really isn't as fun or funny as it seems to think it is. My son laughed like a madman, though, which brings me back to oooold. Ah well. Warner's Blu-ray release won't widen any generation gaps. With an excellent video presentation and a solid DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, it all goes down pretty easy. It would have been nice to see Warner include more special features -- or even to upgrade the two episodes of the original cartoon series that are included in high definition -- but the studio's Scooby Doo BDs aren't exactly overflowing with content. Bottom line? It's a bum movie but the kids'll dig it.