TRICK OR TREAT SCOOBY-DOO!

Directed by Audie Harrison. United States. 2022.

I thought it would be fun to watch every movie titled Trick or Treat (or something similar) for Halloween this year. That didn’t go so well for me. First, I had to watch a lame, overlong heavy metal craptacular called TRICK OR TREAT, and then I had to watch an even worse grade-Z garbage fire called TRICK OR TREATS. That one was nothing but 70 minutes of a fat kid lazily pranking his babysitter. So forget the tricks, goddamn it. I deserve a treat this time around, and what better treat than a good ol’ Scooby-Doo cartoon?

After all, what self-respecting horror fan doesn’t like Scooby-Doo? It’s one of the few horror-themed cartoons of my childhood. It was in perpetual syndication, too, and not just on Saturday mornings. It felt like any time of day, I could turn on the boob tube, and there he’d be. Scooby-Dooby-Doo. It was also nice because my friends could watch it, so we had something to talk about. Unlike my parents, who trusted me enough not to stab my sister to death with a kitchen knife while playing Michael Myers, my friend’s parents wouldn’t let them so much as sniff an R-rated movie. So while I was watching the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies and other kid-appropriate titles like MANIAC, they were stuck with, well, whatever the fuck normal kids watch.

For a lot of kids, Scooby-Doo was their first exposure to horror tropes and clichés. Every episode was full of them, and while I’m sure that shit would be spooky to a kid who didn’t just watch Freddy Krueger drown someone in a waterbed, for me it never got the ol’ spook-o-meter revving. I just found it to be a whole lot of fun. It was also my first exposure to debunking the supernatural, something that became more and more interesting to me over the years.

Mystery Inc. would go on to debunk ghosts, Yetis, Loch Ness Monsters, Bigfoots, aliens, vampires, mummies, all the fun shit. While I have a healthy interest in ghost sightings and cryptozoology, I don’t believe any of it. Not for one second. I’m far more interested in why people believe those kinds of things. I’m especially interested in the psychology of people who would spend their lives In Search Of... ‘insert spooky thing here’. Cryptozoologists and alien hunters are way more interesting than Sasquatches and little green men. So Scooby-Doo was right down my alley as a kid. Ghosts and monsters, debunking the supernatural, funny pratfalls, AND a talking dog! Fuck yeah. Gimme more.

We open in Kathmandu. A cat monster is chasing Scooby and Shaggy down the snowy slopes of a mountain. After distracting it with a big laser pointer, the rest of Mystery Inc. trigger an avalanche, conveniently burying the monster up to its shoulders. Velma unmasks the feline terror. It’s an old woman. No one questions why an old woman would get distracted by a laser pointer. They analyze a whisker from the cat suit and determine it was made by the same person responsible for all the other costumes worn by thieves and crooks over the years: Coco Diablo, suit maker extraordinaire.

Coco isn’t some haggard ol’ crook. She’s a smart, savvy fashion designer who displays her high standards by feeding subpar costuming to her pit of voracious alligators. This movie has nothing nice to say about the fashion industry. Or the prison system. Or the rich, for that matter. Anyway, at this point, warm nostalgia set in. So did the charm of the hand-drawn animation and wonderfully self-referential tone. Scooby-Doo has been around for many, many years. The people in charge of making these movies are done pretending that Shaggy and Scooby aren’t stoners and that Velma doesn’t like vag. They're not afraid to lean into the memes and the wear the show's subtext on their sleeves.

They set up a sting with Shaggy posing as a potential customer. Coco offers to give him a suit if he promises to kill Mystery Inc. This is enough to get Coco sent to prison, but not before Velma falls head over heels for her. If you ever wonder why this movie has abysmal audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, now you know. Never doubt the capacity for grown men and women to review bomb a movie made for pre-teens because it has a tiny drop of the gay in it. You’d think there was a scene of Velma getting elbow-deep in Coco in the back of the Mystery Machine. Alas, Velma just sputters, stutters, and makes a fool of herself whenever she’s near Coco. For a series so willing to openly elbow its audience, I’d say they chose the least in-your-face way to handle an innocuous, cute crush.

So with the leading costume supplier for scheming crooks in prison, what is there for Mystery Inc. to do? Well, they do some pest control in a grocery store, save cats from trees, find a missing wallet, and unclog a bathtub drain. It’s been a year, and the boredom is setting in. Shaggy and Scooby are loving it, but Fred looks like he’s one day away from tying that ascot a little tighter and looping it around a ceiling beam. They set up a booth at a local Halloween festival in hopes of finding new clients, but they can’t even compete with an old coot balancing a goat on his head. I didn’t think TRICK OR TREAT SCOOBY-DOO! would comment on the existential horror of working a boring 9-to-5 job, but here we are.

In desperation, Fred tosses a coin into a wishing well. A ghost emerges, its guts hanging out of its stomach. It blows up the Mystery Machine, chasing the gang around the festival. Fred is ecstatic about this turn of events. Wanting more information about the ghost, they decide to visit Coco in prison. The guy in charge, Warden Collins, is a Mystery Inc. fanboy and potential sadist who enjoys shocking prisoners with his force field containment mechanisms. He also physically assaults an inmate. You might want to look into that, guys.

We get a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS reference when we’re re-introduced to Coco, and we get to meet her black cat, Esteban. Warden Collins allows Coco to join Mystery Inc. on their investigation. They discover a name etched in the guest book they brought to the festival: Friedrich Nefario. They head to the spooky section of the library (it’s literally labeled ‘spooky section’; it even has bats and spiderwebs everywhere) and find a book that details Nefario’s history. He lived in the Carpathian Mountains and was pals with high society. He had a council: Daisy, a socialite, Helga, a scientific genius, and Craggly and his attack dog, Rudy. They called themselves Misery Co., basically the dark mirror version of Mystery Inc.

Misery Co. had gained eternal life, and all they have to do to keep it is maintain the karmic balance of good and evil. With Mystery Inc. cleaning up the streets so damn well, Misery Co. became active once again. The balance is out of whack. There is too much good and not enough bad. So are the disgusting ghouls of Misery Co. really undead phantoms, or are they flesh-and-blood crooks who would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids?

Look, this isn’t Studio Ghibli. This is a direct-to-video WB production, so don’t expect mind-blowing animation or deep, generation-defining screenwriting. This is pure Scooby-Doo Halloween fun. From start to finish, this is a charming, delightful little movie with wonderful animation, clever winks and nods to classic horror movies, and just enough of a mystery to keep your brain from shutting off. There’s a Tim Burton diving montage that had me beaming from ear to ear. I love that the mystery isn’t solved by careful examination of evidence or hard work. A professional snob who wears a measuring tape like a scarf notices some shoddy costume design. They’re not trying to be Dashiell Hammett here. They’re just having fun, and the idea that the mystery is solved because some of the animation isn’t up to snuff is wonderfully self-referential.

The finale sees our heroes donning classic villain costumes to nab a bevy of escaped convicts. It’s a grand reversal. The great unmaskers are scaring the snot out of crooks. It’s lovely, especially when Shaggy hypnotizes a couple of kids and orders them to beat the shit out of an old man. The final shot has Fred tossing dollar bill after dollar bill down that wishing well while his cohorts maniacally laugh nearby, damn near on the verge of tears. Fred had a whale of a time solving this case, and so did I. It’s good holiday fun for those of us who never quite outgrew simple pleasures and joys of a good cartoon.