Board Thread:Movie discussions/@comment-252417-20190905162205/@comment-252417-20191107115142

This may be the worst film in the series. Sam Register's continues his major power trip, and doesn't care what the hell they shovel out, Jim Krieg is feeling pretty almighty in his recently gained producer role (replacing Alan Burnett), thinking he has unquestionable insight into what makes a good Scooby-Doo film, and Jeremy Adams continues his "I can't believe my luck" role thanks to his BFF Krieg.

The film is supposed to be a love letter to the franchise in general, and it just but choices to try and kill two birds with one stone by making the film a sequel to, but works to destroy that from beginning to end, because nobody who worked on the film understands or cares about the original, they just honestly think they're making a few fans happy. And this is all well and good, but this new film itself doesn't do itself any favours by putting in flashbacks that contradicts itself, because Zombie Island apparently wasn't that faithful. It retcons scenes in such a way, that it doesn't make sense. I repeat, they do not make sense, not just in comparison to the original, but within the film itself. It also adds clues based on what supposedly happened in the original, which just makes the film more of an awkward sequel then it needs to be.

It's also bent on continuing a loose thread from, where Fred had to sell the Mystery Machine, and the gang had to stop being mystery solvers. The latter is implied to be resolved and will be fixed once the movie ends, and the former will be resolved at the same time. But the Mystery Machine is still missing in Return to Zombie Island. So, it's this whole subplot of Sad Fred without his beloved van, which is somewhat redundant after Frankencreepy.

It has barely any laughs, other than "Ha ha, I'm an idiot child who will just laugh at anything" jokes. There's nothing generally amusing about the film. There is a chase with a monster truck type Mystery Machine, but even that is pretty weak, like that's supposed to save the film, along with a boat explosion, which did provide some tension, but then it went back to being weakly played.

Elvira has a weak cameo, because, hey, they'd need anything to pump up the movie.

The animation is subpar (yeah, compared to the original, but even still it's pretty crappy).

Velma is the worst part of the movie. Yes, Velma doesn't believe in real monsters, but in the original film she had to accept this as a reality, something that was shown to be real. Real. There was nothing left unresolved in that area. But here she is apparently being purposefully ignorant of that case, and is back to "old self" in which the mystery is unresolved and everything they saw wasn't real at all: It was down to SWAMP GAS. The result of being victims to the hallucinations of swamp gas for everything that happened and nobody can question that ever.

They just make an ass out of Velma, and it isn't amusing, just because it doesn't fit into the view of what WBA see the franchise as. Fine, they want to see it as the view which was depicted in Where Are You. It should have just been an original movie, that wasn't a SEQUEL to another story which had real monsters.

The first song is okay, and it fits within Fred's daydream. But the second song just doesn't fit the tone of the film. It feels forced and unnatural. It would fit natural in something was purely 100% styled after Where Are You!, but it's a WAY song trying to be played in another style's film that had alternative rock, that fit the film. That film didn't have bubble gum pop songs, because it wouldn't have fit.

It's a very confused film, with somewhat confused goals in what it's trying to achieve, which makes The 13th Ghost and its problems look better in comparison.

And on top of that, the movie is called Return to Zombie Island, yet the zombies only play a small part. Oh, yeah, because this is Scooby-Doo, there has to be an element of mystery, so even though the film works to undo all the real monsters being real, there's an unexplained possibly real werewolf in the film. BECAUSE MYSTERY AND WONDERMENT OF THE UNKNOWN IS A MUST. Yep, who knows. Will it ever be explained? No.