![]() (The filmmakers have some fun when the sleuths meet their fans on the rope line, especially when Shaggy is drawn to his admirers by the strange, presumably herbal scent wafting over their mellowed-out heads.) The party can't last, however, and before it's over Scooby and the gang are once again doing battle with the very ghosts they thought they'd vanquished forever. The movie opens as they arrive at a red-carpet affair at the Coolsonian museum, which is opening an exhibit of the ghosts their outfit, Mystery Inc., has busted. Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Velma (Linda Cardellini), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and the ravenous Great Dane Scooby-Doo (computer software of indeterminate lineage) have become celebrities in their native Coolsville. In "Monsters Unleashed," things pick up pretty much where the last one left off. No one goes broke underestimating them, least of all the quota-conscious product managers at the "Scooby-Doo" franchise. Every generation, of course, will happily gobble up even the blandest, dumbest pop-cultural fare from its collective youth, but the boomers - now accompanied by their requisite 1.86 kids - represent a market rivaled only by China for sheer volume and force. "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed" reunites the human and computer-generated cast that made the first one such a hit, slathering self-referential humor over an otherwise flaccid story to create a long, hectic late-boomer nostalgia trip. ![]() So it comes as no surprise that the factory specializing in the standardized widgets that sometimes pass for movies would fire up the conveyor belt and extrude another one, pronto. When "Scooby-Doo," the live-action adaptation of the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon, was released in 2002, it became a blockbuster of monstrous proportions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |