For those who’s seen episodes of the cartoon series, the script with require little explanation.  There’s an urban legend that creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were smoking something (other than nicotine) when creating the Scooby-Doo concept.  It’s the story of two guys, two girls and a talking dog who solve mysteries.  Practically every episode was the same and to be honest, it’d be the last cartoon I’d expect to see made into a live action film.  Oh well, I was wrong.

In this adventure, Fred (Jones), Daphne (Gellar), Shaggy (Lillard), Velma (Cardellini) and Scooby have all gone their separate ways.  After years of solving mysteries, they’ve become arrogant and decided to begin individual careers.  Two years later, they are reluctantly reunited when Mondavarious (Atkinson), the owner of a new theme park named Spooky Island, ask them to solve a new mystery.  It seems the teen crowd that are attracted to the island are being brainwashed into mindless zombies.

The plot is plain dumb and needed way more spice.  The villains and ghosts/monsters are very silly and not even remotely close to the stuff I remember from the original cartoon.  Of the cast, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy is the only believable cast member.  His voice is amazingly similar to that of Shaggy in the cartoon and given his sense of humour, it’s no wonder he gets the most on-screen time.  Scooby is a computer generated character and is fun in his own right but it’s too obvious he isn’t real.

Freddie Prinze Jr would be my least favourite actor.  He is pathetic and his bad acting skills combined with bad script decisions has seen him feature in the abominable Head Over Heels, Boys And Girls, Down To You and Wing Commander.  This film was shot in Brisbane at Movie World and the stories from the set are very interesting.  Prinze and girlfriend co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar refused to eat lunch with the other cast and refused to be on set unless required.  Any extras were ordered not to look directly at either Prinze or Gellar between shooting scenes.  Who are these arrogant pricks?  What gives them such a god given right?  No offence, but both have much to learn about acting and neither has a long career ahead of them.

Within a week of seeing the opening day box-office numbers, the studio has already announced a sequel is in the works to be released in 2004.  You see???  This what you get by going to see this film!  By handing over our money, we’re only encouraging them to make even more shit!  It’s time the U.S. government stops focusing on the war in Afghanistan and starts looking at some of the atrocities being committed against audience members in the nation’s multiplexes.