Scooby fans the day has finally arrived the newest Scooby-Doo! movie is finally here and you guys know what means i'm here to talk about it. This is a movie that alot of fans have been excited for since the first trailer came out and I was one of them so here we go with my review of Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost.
The plot of this movie is The gang make a mistake when solving a mystery and choose to retire but as there selling there things an old friend gives them call and tells them that the 13th ghost has been found. That's really it in terms of plot but honestly that's all you really need and in my opinion the plot of this movie really does work it doesn't assume you watched !3 Ghosts it gives you enough information about that series and puts into one fun story.
As the scooby regulars we have Frank Welker as Scooby-Doo and Fred Jones , Grey Griffin as Daphne Blake , Matthew Lillard as Shaggy Rogers and Kate Micucci as Velma Dinkley. The regular voice cast do a really good job in this movie I can't really say anything bad about this cast because of the fact that there all really good actors.
In terms of guest cast we have Maurice LaMarche as Vincent Van Ghoul, Bernie Alan, and Vance Linklater , Noshir Dalal as Flim Flam and Nolan North as Asmodeus, Mortifier, and Farmer Morgan. In terms of what I thought about the acting from the guest cast it was really good altho I have t9o wonder why they didn't get Susan Blu back to play Flim Flam since she is still alive and working. The only minor issue I had with the acting is the fact that I didn't like Maurice LaMarche's impersonation of Vincent Price but that's just my opinion.
The animation was handled by Digital eMation and I can't really find anything on this company so I can't really say if they've worked on anything else or if this is there best work. I can say tho that the animation seen in this film is honestly really good there's a lot of great fluid movement in it and even the 13th ghost himself looks really good. There is a downside tho and that's the fact that for some reason all of the characters have this shine to them which just looks weird and kind of of-putting.
When a new Scooby-Doo movie gets announced there's never any kind of response from casual fans but for some reason when the trailer for this movie got posted alot of people were talking about it. When I say alot I mean alot there's was a ton of people of twitter all talking about this film and even websites that don't usually post Scooby-Doo news were posting about this trailer it was both weird and awesome at the same time. The last time I think the internet went this crazy over a straight to DVD movie was the infamous Tom & Jerry Willy Wonka movie so to see it happen here but only in a positive light was odd for me.
Much has been said about how this movie is the finale to The 13 Ghosts Of Scooby-Doo and it honestly does kind of feel like that. I say kind of because of how long it took for this to come out it also feels like a reunion episode and that really wasn't something that I wanted I wanted something that finished of that storyline but I didn't want to spend alot of the movie catching up with certain characters because it added nothing to the overall story.
I know that this is going to make alot of Scooby-Doo fans unhappy but a key character in The 13 Ghosts series was Scrappy Doo and he's not even in this movie. He does get referenced but it's done as part of joke and that just felt wrong to me since he was a key character so it would have made sense for him to appear in this movie. He got the star treatment compared to Weerd and Bogel who in case you forgot were two ghosts who would constantly try and stop the gang from recapturing the ghosts because they weren't even mentioned at all in this movie.
I have to give the film around of applause because they somehow managed to make Daphne a bada*s i'm not even kidding she gets a lot of the most badas* moments in this movie. Not only that she also has a subplot with Fred since she was the leader of the gang in 13 Ghosts and Fred is usually the leader so the two have to come to an understanding and it was really interesting to see that play out because of the fact that I don't think the franchise has ever had a plot line like this in either the movies both live action and animated or the TV show.
For once i;m glad that there wasn't a mystery in this movie which I know sounds really freaking odd since it's Scooby-Doo a show based around solving mysteries. Here's the thing 13 Ghosts wasn't that was more of an action comedy show so it makes sense that this movie would instead focus on those elements rather then creating a good mystery altho just because this film didn't do one it doesn't mean that the rest of them shouldn't do it.
I'm going to say something that i've never said about any straight to DVD comedy and that's that this film actually had some good jokes. I'm not kidding this movie had me laughing alot more then what I thought it would be it references to other shows in the franchise or the fact that there's a running joke about people being afraid of teenagers there's plenty of good jokes in here and it makes me wonder why there aren't many like this in the other films.
Overall out of all the Scooby-Doo movies out there this one is the best one so far in my opinion this is a movie that both fans of 13 Ghosts and young kids can very easily sit down and enjoy. That said it is also a flawed film and I hope that i've mentioned some of those flaws with that in mind the film scores an 8 out of 10 from me.