comedy

Shrunken Heads (1994)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

Family members collaborate on films all the time, but when the Elfman family gets together for a film, things get really weird. Richard Elfman, the brilliant mind behind the film The Forbidden Zone, directed Shrunken Heads. Richard’s brother, Danny Elfman, composed the main title theme, and his son, Bodhi Elfman, plays the role of street punk Booger Martin. Add the sick mind of Charles Band to the mix, and you’ve got the perfect B movie.

Shrunken Heads is an abnormal superhero movie with elements of horror and dark comedy. A street gang viciously murders three boys from New York City, but it just so happens that the boys’ neighborhood pal, Mr. Sumatra (Julius Harris), is a Haitian witch doctor. He sneaks into the funeral home after the boys’ service comes to an end, saws off their heads & takes them back to his apartment to shrink them with magical powers. Sumatra is able to train the boys’ shrunken heads to use their new powers, and they begin to put an end to the crime in their neighborhood & take revenge on their killers. These three little heads float around the city streets like The Powerpuff Girls, killing all the bad guys & turning their victims into zombies. While doing his best to rid the streets of crime, Tommy (one of the heads), also tries to develop a relationship with his old girlfriend Sally, which is difficult since he’s dead & doesn’t have a body. Mr. Sumatra ends up being a love guru as well as a witch doctor and is responsible for one of my favorite quotes in the film: “Never have I seen or heard of a human head made so small to show affection of this sort.”

Being one of my favorite B movies of all time, I highly recommended Shrunken Heads to everyone because there really is a little something for everybody in this film. There’s action, comedy, drama, magic, love, lots of cool/cheesy special effects, and even a portrayal of the step-by-step process of making shrunken heads.

Shrunken Heads is currently available on Hulu.

-Britnee Lombas

Prêt-à-Porter (1994)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

Robert Altman’s follow-up to the surprisingly potent (and far superior) Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear), applies the director’s casual, large-ensemble aesthetic to the colorful backdrop of Paris Fashion Week. Altman’s typically nonjudgmental tone is somewhat absent here as characters frequently devolve into the kind of self-parody you’d expect in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but they’re more or less charming all the same. Prêt-à-Porter is a loose, amused take on the fashion industry that tries to succeed less on having something to say and more on having someone interesting say it.

In true Altman form, the cast is stacked: Sophia Loren, Kim Basinger, Forrest Whitaker, Rupert Everett, Julia Roberts, Lauren Bacall, Tim Robbins, Lyle Lovett, Tracey Ullman, Cher, Naomi Campbell, Teri Garr, and Harry Belafonte all participate in some capacity. By filming during Paris Fashion Week, Altman achieves an even larger ensemble cast of familiar faces than usual, which unfortunately may be the film’s greatest accomplishment. I was drawn to Prêt-à-Porter when I read that even Björk had a brief cameo as a runway model. “Brief” is even a generous word for it, as she merely passes across the screen in her Mother Nature Incarnate mode, the (real life) fashion line she’s modeling having something to do with snow & wilderness. The themes of different fashion lines are a consistent source of amusement for the film as they each intensely focus on a singular, seemingly empty idea: boots, subway cars, Scotland, etc. An American news reporter with a Southern accent works as an audience surrogate as she politely navigates the vapidity of each runway show. One campaign simply marketing nudity, the complete absence of fashion, finally prompts her “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” Network moment & she storms off.

Prêt-à-Porter occupies a strange space between light ribbing and outright mockery. Parts of it feel like Altman’s fashion world version of Guest’s Best in Show, but it never completely tips in that direction. Other parts feel like an undercooked version of the everything-is-connected story Altman had told many times before in much better films. A couple hours loafing along with this impressive assortment of celebrities is not a particularly bad way to spend your time, especially if you have severe 90s nostalgia or an intense interest in the fashion industry, but it could’ve been a much better film if it pushed itself a little harder in any specific direction.

Prêt-à-Porter is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

Anna and the Moods (2007)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

It’s nearly impossible to be hard on Anna and the Moods, an animated short children’s film from 2007. It’s not perfect, but it is perfectly charming. Because the title character was voiced by the musician Björk I expected a story about a young girl singer in a rock band called The Moods. Instead I was treated to a quirky, compassionate take on puberty and what The Fresh Prince would call The “Parents Just Don’t Understand” Dilemma.

Anna and the Moods tells the story of a young girl who is expected to be consistently cheerful & obedient by her family, which she does willingly until she one day wakes up transformed. No longer a sentient beam of sunshine, Anna finds herself plagued by “moodicles” (hormone-induced moods). Her image shifts from that of a precious little girl to a moody goth teen and she decides to freak her parents out instead of playing to their expectations. She smokes cigars, commits petty crimes, listens to loud music, and develops a questionable taste in boys. Disturbed, Anna’s parents subject her to psychological evaluation, where a doctor, to their horror, diagnoses her as a “teenager”. Instead of prescribing her a solution to the newfound shifts in her mood, the doctor teaches Anna how to deal with flawed parenting. The movie takes a mischievous stance on the sudden changes that come with puberty, encouraging kids to misbehave, but also warning them that their parents are going to be jerks about it.

Directed by one of Björk’s former bandmates from the alt rock group The Sugarcubes, Anna and the Moods works with some hideously cheap CGI, but uses the handicap to its advantage. The characters look like snotty versions of Margaret Keane’s “big eyes” paintings and the whole picture has a bending, warped surreality to it that fits the puberty-altered mindset of its subject well. Monty Python veteran Terry Jones narrates with a perfectly measured children’s book tone that makes the movie’s less successful elements (like an unnecessary potshot at Michael Jackson) more than forgivable. It’s not a complicated or even a good-looking film, but as a short, fun trifle with an empathetic message & a sense of mischief, it’s sincerely entertaining.

-Brandon Ledet

Ready to Rumble (2000)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

wrasslin

three star

campstamp

The Royal Rumble is the last major pro wrestling pay-per-view before Wrestlemania. It’s a chaotic, cluttered mess of an event, and one of the highlights of the annual wrestling cycle. My friends & I partied hard for this year’s Rumble, filling a tiny apartment with chips, dips, liquors, “royal rum balls” and drunken shouting. It was a blast until the disappointing, telegraphed conclusion to the main event, an inevitability that had the crowd both in our living room and on the TV screen openly booing. Knowing what was coming before the Rumble even started, I psyched myself up with a ludicrous YouTube clip of an infamous wrestling incident in 2000 that was met with its own open ridicule: the time professional goofball/actor David Arquette became WCW’s World Heavyweight Champion.

A wrestling fan himself, David Arquette knew an actor becoming the WCW World Heavyweight Champion would not go over well with the crowd. He reportedly protested the angle, but WCW’s booking insisted it would be great promotion. The product they were pushing? Arquette’s pro wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, a massive critical and financial flop. Although it failed in its time, Ready to Rumble has gradually proved itself (through its mere existence) as a time capsule of a bygone era. It’s a strange relic of wrestling’s unexpected late 90s, early 00s boost in popularity. The fact that WCW felt it could justify a $24mil production alone frames the film as culturally significant, even if they were ultimately proved wrong. Their preposterous plan to promote the film by making Arquette a real life heavyweight champion makes the movie a truly singular oddity. Usually, if a wrestling promotion is going to push a film career, like with Hulk Hogan or The Rock, they promote from within. Bringing a Hollywood outsider (a real life fan or not) into the ring is not without precedent, but handing them the belt is beyond ridiculous and not something fans will suffer quietly.

Another strange facet of the Arquette debacle was his relationship with actual pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. In Ready to Rumble DDP plays the heel, the villain to Arquette’s unlikely hero. In the real WCW ring they were tag team partners. The inconsistency is even more bizarre when you consider that Oliver Platt played the film’s fictional face, wrestler Jimmy King. If you were trying to logically promote the film in a WCW match, the natural choice would be for Platt (as Jimmy King) to wrestle DDP on television in a quick, one-off promotion. Platt, despite being a legitimately talented actor, seems to consistently be slumming it in his choices of roles, so a 5 minute promotional wrestling bit doesn’t seem all that out of the question. Instead, WCW opted for a long-form angle featuring David Arquette (as David Arquette) becoming their undisputed champion, a decision that suggests a lack of respect for the sport & its fans, including Arquette himself.

In isolation from its ridiculous real-life promotion, Ready to Rumble displays a humble reverence for pro wrestling as a sport, falling clearly on the mark side of the mark/smark divide. The movie opens with claims that pro wrestlers are “the greatest athletes of all time” and “heroes of history”. These “superior athletes, superior men” are given plenty of screen time with the kind of overstated cameos that take an audience’s adoration for granted. Appearing here alongside DDP are the likes of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Sting, Goldberg, Booker T, “Mean” Gene Okerlund, and a few other big industry names, including a brief glimpse of a young John Cena. There are a few smarky admissions, like wrestlers discussing choreography during matches and an unusually violent Martin Landau playing a Stu Hart stand-in, but for the most part this is a world where wrestling is both real and real important.

The movie’s major misstep is in its long stretches outside of the wrestling ring. The road trip segments of the film are overloaded with gross-out, non sequitur, teenage boy shenanigans: porta-potties, horny old ladies, and toothless hicks all played for unfortunate humor. There are some transcendent moments to be found in this frat house amusement, like Rose McGowan’s hot to trot wrestling fan engaging in “bedroom matches” and a van full of flatulent nuns performing a cover of “Running with the Devil” that’s less Van Halen and more The Roches, but for the most part it’s flat & forgettable. It’s the exact brand of dumb fun that plays well in a wrestling ring, but fails to translate well to the big screen.

I’m not sure that the film’s comedic failure is necessarily a bad thing. Ready to Rumble is unashamed of being a mindless trifle, marketable only to an audience already receptive to pro wrestling & complete garbage, a rather large audience at the time of its production. There’s a working class veneer to the film, complete with a Kid Rock soundtrack and Insane Clown Posse t-shirts. Arquette’s protagonist is the son of a cop who works in sanitation, loiters in front of corner stores, and dreams of meeting his favorite pro wrestler. He & his buddy rough house at their menial jobs and fantasize about executing wrestling moves on their bullies. It’s a pandering approach to comedy, but at least it’s closely familiar with the audience it’s catering to.

In the film’s promotion, however, all of this goodwill for pro wrestling fans was destroyed by Arquette’s championship victory cheapening the (already cheap enough) WCW title. 15 years later, that heartfelt betrayal plays more like a bizarre historical footnote, one with a feature film attached. Arquette’s championship may have helped ruin Ready to Rumble & WCW as financial enterprises in the year 2000, but it also gave them a strange longevity in cultural significance. It’s an occasionally funny movie with a thoroughly ludicrous context & execution that’s still worth scratching your head over in 2015.

-Brandon Ledet

Frank (2014)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

EPSON MFP image
fourstar
“I’ve always wanted to work with someone who shares my dream of making extremely likable music.”

It seems easier now than ever to be a “musician”: gather a couple friends, write a few songs, release them on the Internet.  But just because your music is easier to get heard does not mean that it’s necessarily good. In the 2014 comic drama Frank we follow one such mediocre musician, Jon, played by Domhnall Gleeson, who finds himself dropping everything to join an avant-garde pop band led by the enigmatic and mysterious Frank. Frank is a musical savant with a history of mental illness who hides himself inside a large papier-mâché head.  Jon is enthralled with Frank’s outsider art but fails to see past his own ambitions and realize that there are dark secrets behind that fake, gigantic head.

Frank is grounded by a stunning performance from Michael Fassbender as the titular protagonist who channels Jim Morrison, Captain Beefheart, and Daniel Johnston; artists whose own troubled past and history of mental illness mirror Frank’s. Props should also be given Domnhall Gleeson, as it could have been easy to lose our sympathy for Jon as he latches on to Frank’s coattails. But in the end we realize he’s just trying to be something he’s not and for that he earns our sympathy instead of our scorn.

Some viewers might feel that the story loses steam in its melodramatic finale but the emotional third act brings home the larger theme of how different people react to mental illness when it is coupled with something like vast creativity: diner patrons call Frank a “freak” and laugh at him; Jon thinks he must have been ‘traumatized’; Frank’s parents love and support him, but are clueless about how to help him.

Ultimately, what sounds like a premise for a ridiculous indie comedy instead ends up being a deeply moving exploration of mental illness and blind artist worship. It is also wickedly funny. Director Lenny Abrahamson does a great job of juggling the seemingly contradictory tones in the film: whimsical and offbeat, sweet and punk-spirited, funny and melancholic. A definite must watch.

Frank is currently streaming on Netflix.

-James Cohn

Can’t Stop the Music (1980)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

EPSON MFP image
three star
campstamp
I’ll never forget the first time I discovered Can’t Stop the Music and all of its tacky goodness. My best friend and I were searching for a Friday night movie at Major Video, a great local video rental store that has sadly closed up shop, and we hit the jackpot. Waiting on the bottom shelf of the comedy aisle was Can’t Stop the Music. Deciding to rent it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. This film’s got everything: an amazing soundtrack with loads of Village People tunes, bizarre dance routines, tons of exposed chest hair, and Bruce Jenner in his prime.

The film starts out with one of the greatest roller-skating scenes ever, and it’s personally my favorite part of the movie. Jack Morell (Steve Guttenberg) is skating around the streets of New York like a pro to the David London’s “The Sound of the City” after quitting his job in order to take a DJ gig at a nightclub. This scene is the reason I own a pair of roller skates; that’s how inspirational it is. Another unforgettable moment is the dance number the cast performs to the Village People’s mega-hit “YMCA.” There’s a bit of nudity (no surprise there) in this scene, which really makes me wonder how this received a PG rating. What was the MPAA thinking? I could list all my favorite parts of this movie, but that would probably take forever because the whole movie is just so bizarre.

Even though I’ve seen this movie a million times, I still don’t understand what it’s about. I guess that’s the magic of it? It’s basically supposed to be a movie about the formation of the Village People, but it’s really just a mess of terrible acting, a bad script, musical numbers that make no sense whatsoever, and crappy special effects. It’s no secret that the film didn’t achieve much success. Also, releasing a disco-themed musical in 1980 wasn’t the best idea since disco was pretty much dead. Can’t Stop the Music actually won the very first Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture and inspired John J. B. Wilson to start what is now known as the Razzies. If that’s not reason enough to see a film, then I don’t know what is.

Can’t Stop The Music is currently streaming on Netflix & Amazon Prime.

-Britnee Lombas

Wetlands (2014)

/ swampflix / 30 Comments

EPSON MFP image

2014 was a weird year for the romcom. It’s not often that a modern romcom earns the kind of critical praise that lands it on Best of the Year lists or empathetically addresses a subject as sensitive as abortion, but last year’s Obvious Child accomplished both. The genre also found its first ZAZ-style spoof in They Came Together and some common ground with supernatural horror in The One I Love. These were all exciting developments in a genre long thought stagnant, but by far the strangest new territory under the romcom umbrella was explored by the German film Wetlands.

Most likely the cutest movie about an anal fissure you’ll ever see, Wetlands is by and large an exercise in depravity. It’s as if de Sade or Bataille had written a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan comedy. If there’s a particular bodily fluid, sexual act, or unsanitary pizza topping that you absolutely cannot handle this may not be the movie for you. However, those who can endure a heap of gross-out humor are well rewarded for their fortitude. Like its 18 year old protagonist Helen (expertly played by Carla Juri) the film’s hard, shock value exterior is really a front for a big old softie lurking under the surface. For all of Helen’s filthy sex pranks and hygiene “experiments”, she’s really just an overgrown child who desperately wants her parents to get back together and for her hunky crush to notice her advances. There’s also some real pain behind her troubled relationships with her mother, her brother & her best friend, as well some surreally lyrical tangents involving dirty panties, microscopic closeups of bacteria, drug binges, and newly sprouted avocado trees. The film may be memorable for the depths of its depravity, but more importantly it manages a remarkable balance that allows it to stick to the romcom format while navigating those depths.

After its minuscule domestic release last year, I’m stoked that Wetlands is finally accessible for easy consumption on streaming platforms & physical media. As far as I know the only time it played locally was at Chalmette Movies during last year’s New Orleans Film Festival. The film was difficult to watch in more ways than one and, as it was my favorite comedy of 2014 (and in my top 5 movies overall), I’ve been sitting on my hands waiting for an opportunity to spread its name. If you’re worried that Wetlands is too grotesque for your taste, this (absurdly NSFW) trailer is a good litmus test. Otherwise, check it out on streaming or home video ASAP. It’s somehow just as cute as it is gross. It’s very, very gross.

-Brandon Ledet

It’s A Disaster (2013)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

disaster

fourstar

Although its sense of humor is decidedly more uncomfortable than either, It’s A Disaster is the same vein of realistic, self-absorbed approaches to widespread disasters as comedies like Shaun of the Dead & Life After Beth. Instead of a zombie attack, this small group of friends is trying to survive couples’ brunch . . . and the fallout from a series of dirty bombs set off in downtown Los Angeles.

Chemical warfare is the mechanism that keeps the characters cooped up inside the house, unable to escape brunch, but their toxic personal relationships are the real threat. Important news broadcasts are disregarded in favor of confessions of betrayal. Planning for survival takes a backseat to pointless power plays, cruel insults, and sexual advances. This isn’t quite the sadistic, drunken argument gallows humor of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? & The Boys in the Band, but it’s not far off.

It’s the kind of movie that has its cake and eats it too. With mimosas to drink. The personal relationships are vicious, but also sweet. The letdown of an ending is so well handled that it’s a send-up of letdown endings. Everyone’s having the worst day of their life, but also a pretty great time. There’s a very delicate balance between jovial & soul-crushing that It’s A Disaster handles expertly. It obviously helps that the entire film is hilarious.

It’s partly the casual nature of the performances that keeps the mood light despite the grim premise. Julia Stiles & America Ferrera are particularly great here, but the one performance that really struck me is David Cross’. Cross usually goes big in his comedic roles and is rarely afforded time to slowly ramp up the crazy the way he is here. Usually he plays a ridiculous caricature suited for his sketch comedy roots, his entire personality established early & often. Even in last year’s Obvious Child, Cross played the one character in a grounded cast that felt unbelievable as a real person. In It’s A Disaster, Cross is introduced as an audience surrogate, a doorway into an established world of ludicrous, lethal friendships before the pressure of the situation gets to him and he joins their ranks. I’ve always enjoyed Cross’ work, but this is up there among his best. It’s a great performance in a great film about an awful, awful brunch.

It’s A Disaster is currently streaming on Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

“Unedited Footage of a Bear” & The Year of the Doppelgänger

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

bear

After posting a too-long article trying to make sense out of last year’s surge of doppelgänger movies earlier this week, someone pointed out to me that I missed a major one: “Unedited Footage of a Bear”. “Unedited Footage” is a horror/comedy short from the same Adult Swim Infomercials program that produced the 2014-defining “Too Many Cooks”. (Did I get that song stuck in your head again? I am so sorry.) Where “Cooks” deconstructed an impressive range of television formats and worked them into a singular slasher film, “Unedited Footage” did the same with a much narrower genre: allergy medicine commercials. Using the fine print listed side effects of medication commercials & the intense artificiality of advertising in general to its disturbing advantage, “Unedited Footage” tells a tight, effective horror story in its fleeting ten minutes. A horror story that hinges on 2014’s biggest pet obsession: doppelgängers.

Although it plays on the popular doppelgänger obsession of last year’s features, “Unedited Footage of a Bear” isn’t a feature film itself. It isn’t even unedited footage of a bear. The entire doppelgänger/slasher storyline is framed as a tangent that distracts from the titular bear, but since it eats up all but 30sec of the runtime & the film never returns to the bear, the doppelgänger plot is the bulk of the film in every sense. Although it acts as the initial framing device, the bear is the tangent. The doppelgänger is the heart.

Despite the arrival of “Unedited Footage” at the December finish line & its depiction of a doppelgänger murder story, it’s hard for me to justify an addendum including it on that 2014 list. My intention with the “2014’s Doppelgänger Movies & Their Unlikely Doubles” article was to make sense of last year’s varied approaches to that genre by finding those film’s own doppelgängers in other seemingly unrelated movies. Besides the fact that I honestly forgot about “Unedited Footage” at the time, the problem with including it there is that I can’t think of its own double. I can’t think of another film that allows a single tangent to dominate the narrative in that way. (The only one that really comes to mind is that extended dream sequence towards the end of Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion where Lisa Kudrow’s Michele is sleeping in the passenger seat of a convertible, but believes she has gone into the reunion, expertly schmoozed her old classmates by convincing them that she invented the glue on the back of Post-it notes, fails to drag Mira Sorvino’s Romy away from a make-out session, gets hit by a limo, starts her own make-out session in that limo, loses her blouse, accepts an award in her bra, and grows old & wealthy still disconnected from her best friend before she finally wakes to discover it was all just a dream and she hasn’t even left the car. But that doesn’t even come close, really, because that dream only dominates a few minutes of the movie, which soldiers on after it concludes, the same way this article will soldier on after this tangent concludes. Also, I just saw Romy & Michele for the first time a couple nights ago so that’s totally why it’s fresh in my mind.)

2014 saw an unusual excess of new entries for the doppelgänger genre. The idiosyncratic “Unedited Footage of a Bear” deserves to be remembered among them, if not only because any film featuring an original score & brief cameo by Dan Deacon deserves to be remembered. It’s just unclear to me what the movie’s own doppelgänger in this world is, but I’m sure it’s out there, waiting to murder it. (Unless it actually is Romy & Michele, in which case it’ll most likely take it shopping or force-feed it junk food or make it watch Pretty Woman, like, 36 times, which is its own form of death.) Oh, it’s out there.

-Brandon Ledet

Scooby-Doo (2002)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

scooby-doo

three star

EPSON MFP image

The idea of a live-action Scooby-Doo movie was unappealing enough to put me off for over a decade. There was just no way I could imagine the product as anything but hokey & outdated. The truth wasn’t that far off. The jokes in the 2002 Scooby-Doo were cheap & hokey, but no more cheap & hokey than its Hanna-Barbera source material. Adding an air of sophistication to a cartoon about a half-talking dog who solves mysteries with his stoner owner/bro would surely be a misstep. No, to do it right, you’d have to include some stunt cameos (including a bizarrely intimate moment with the band Sugar Ray), some “you meddling kids” call-backs and, of course, a multiple-scene fart gag. Something for the parents, something for the kids.

It was the curious detail of James Gunn’s screenplay credit that eventually brought me around on the idea. How could the twisted mind behind Slither and Tromeo & Juliet be responsible for a franchise so seemingly innocuous? The answer, obviously, is that Scooby-Doo actually has some sharp teeth hidden in its smiling jowls. Among the Sugar Rays & fart gags, Gunn worked in some subversive humor about things like Fred’s masculine vanity, murderous monsters, gender swapping, and Shaggy’s love of Mary Jane (a character whose name is winked at you too hard to ignore even if you wanted to). It’s not like this line of writer’s room mischief (including the drug culture references) wasn’t present in the hippie-era Scooby cartoons. It was there. Gunn just has a clever way of updating that rebellious spirit with just enough snark & meta-commentary to make it feel modern without undermining his screenplay’s reverence for the source material. It’s that balance of perverse pranks & childlike exuberance that Gunn brought to last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, as opposed to the unbridled sadism he infused in projects like Super & 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake. Scooby-Doo is far from James Gunn’s most personal work, but it’s easy to find his personality in it.

The only crippling flaw I can find in this (mercifully short) trifle is the shoddy CGI on the monsters & Scooby himself, which seems like an important detail to nail. Otherwise, it exceeded most expectations, especially in the 90s/00s flashback cast. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddy Prinze Jr, Linda Cardenelli, and Matthew Lillard were kinda perfect as the Mystery Inc. crew. Lillard’s Shaggy was so perfect, in fact, that he still provides the voice for the character’s current animated incarnation. Unfortunately, bringing back the same cast (with welcome additions Peter Boyle & Alicia Silverstone) and James Gunn’s pen for 2004’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed failed to overcome the sequel law of diminishing returns. Monsters Unleashed boasts the same brand of hokey fun as its predecessor, but with the sharp teeth & personality removed. It’s the bland paycheck project I expected when I read James Gunn’s screenplay credit on the original. Instead I was treated to some great, dumb, mischievous fun. I shouldn’t have waited twelve years for that treat.

-Brandon Ledet