Saturday Morning Massacre

I want to make some things clear to anyone considering watching this movie. Saturday Morning Mystery is not a parody, it's not very funny and generally isn't trying to be, and it has next to nothing to do with Scooby Doo.

This is just another low budget horror flick, very low budget, about a Ghost Hunters style scenario going bad when a crew of paranormal debunkers loaded down with video equipment stumble across an actual scary situation. This is a great premise that no one can seem to get right (the original Grave Encounters came closest) and Saturday Morning Mystery is certainly no exception.

Our crew of cash strapped debunkers are sent to a notorious house reputedly once owned by Satanist and now allegedly haunted by... something.

The dysfunctional group includes a druggie, an uptight rich guy, a smart girl that acts as leader, and her best friend. Oh, and a dog, which has nothing to do with the plot and never does anything significant (Scooby Doo he ain't). That dog, along with references in the beginning to criminals using ghost stories to hide their crimes, are the only references to Scooby Doo and there is almost no outright comedy, intentional or unintentional.

The first hour is plodding and dull and the movie stays alive, just barely, by the strength of the cast, which is above average for this type of movie. They're not playing well written characters though and the script seems so choppy and poorly structured that the film never flows well.

All hell breaks loose in the last 30 minutes but I wouldn't really say that it qualifies as a slow burn because the finale is so incongruous with the rest of the movie that it really feels like part of a different film.

An out of nowhere sex scene in the middle of the movie and a hilarious car fire filmed by people that clearly didn't have the money or resources to actually light a car on fire are pretty much the only memorable things about this POS. Just skip it.

As a horror film Saturday Morning Mystery is nothing special. It's not particularly scary or innovative in the 'who, what and how'. The bit that IS innovative is the use of an ersatz version of the gang from Scooby Doo... and that is the film's only real talking point. It lives or dies by how well that is pulled off. Sadly it's a mixed bag of nuts. The first half is great, I enjoyed seeing the real-life version of the characters I watched as a kid... worrying over having no real source of income, having to deal with the police, uncovering criminals whose motives are a bit nastier than 'old man Geezer trying to keep kids away from his gold'. They run into a few quirky characters (what's up with the couple in the diner?) and a haunted house with a bad history. So yeah, the setup is fun. Naturally, I favored the 'Velma' character Nancy. She's brave, perky and smart just like she oughtta be.

To my mind the movie took a turn for the worse when the obligatory 'Shaggy'-induced drug sequence goes down. It took me a moment to realize what was going on and somehow it just didn't sit well. It felt forced... or something. After that, and the equally obligatory 'Fred' and 'Daphne' sex scene it felt like the writers had shot their wad.

The trick of the movie is that it tries to go where Scooby Doo never went... where, as a kid, I always wanted it to go, by giving the kids some REAL monsters to uncover. Unfortunately this is where it pretty much completely drops the Scooby Doo setup and goes straight into 'coeds meet rabid hillbilly' territory. There are no surprises or interesting moments from this point on that haven't been seen in dozens of other fright flicks. I have a larger issue with horror films in general that throw up their hands when it's time to get scary and resort to just chopping up the cast rather than coming up with more creative ways to say 'BOO!'. Death and dismemberment are nasty but a lot can be said for more subtle character-based scares as well. The monsters in Saturday Morning Mystery just are not worthy of their adversaries. For one thing they bear no resemblance to the ersatz spooks the cartoon gang had to thwart... which is fine, but they're not a particularly interesting pack of ghouls in any other way either. They're just there to sneak around in the background and then leap out and kill. Not surprisingly the kids on their own are much more fun to watch.

There is a confused attempt to do the signature 'hallway chase scene' that was often in the old cartoons... but if it was meant to be funny it wasn't.

Really, if it weren't for the first 45 minutes or so of this movie it wouldn't even be worth a discussion because it would be just another slasher flick.

A group of 4 paranormal investigators and a dog are hired to find out what is haunting a giant mansion. The timing is perfect because they are pretty much broke. Previously they caught some child endangerment ring, which was actually a police sting operation. On the trip to the mansion, they meet a friendly cop.

Once inside each of the 4 starts investigating the place on their own. Two of them drink water with LSD in it, because one of them, the dope head hid his LSD in a water container when the cop arrived. They start seeing things and go crazy. Now all of them are screaming at each other. When they find a car with a corpse in the trunk they finally see a child running around. Now they all go after it and some of them are killed.

Now we learn who is haunting the mansion and why and things at last get bloody. The cop also shows up and confronts the villains.

Saturday Morning Mystery features an ugly (with the exception of Josephine Decker) and uncharismatic cast acting like jerks most of the time. The lead is rather annoying and whiny. Of course the "mystery" doesn't happen in the morning but at night, so we get these morons running around rooms with flashlights chasing or being chased by shadows. The story is mildly interesting but as often happens with movies, they wait until the very end to start explaining things and cram most of the story in the last minutes.

If the movie by itself weren't dull enough, we have some marketing genius who thought that deceiving customers would be the way to go and they marketed this as a comedy. This movie is not fun, nor funny, not even all that entertaining. There was material for an alright horror thriller, but they needed a different cast, someone to enhance the script. The director does what he can but without material or a strong cast there's only so much he can do.

This will be short and sweet.

I ENJOYED THIS MUCH MORE THAN I EXPECTED!

Yes...it will remind you of Scooby-Doo. It's supposed to.

Yes...you have to take some things on "faith," which means there are some implausibilities & some factually illogical scenes. What horror movie doesn't have them?

Folks that watch horror movies and then nitpick them to death by saying "why go in there alone?" or "there's no way that could happen" miss the point in my opinion.

I actually really liked how this built steadily through the movie. The director did a good job of using subtleties to build the suspense and form the horror elements without using generic jump scares. Sounds, curiously angles cinematography, mirrors, lighting...they were all used to the director's advantage.

*** A HINT: Pay attention to the entire screen you're watching, throughout the movie. Just sayin.

The acting was pretty decent, I dug the story, the script was acceptable, the direction was good, the scenery was really good (they filmed it in an actual historic mansion), and the production was good.

Contrary to what a few reviews have said, I did not find this gory at all. If you're looking for gore, go elsewhere. There is a bit of blood, and a couple scenes that border on gory, but it's not a gorefest.

Overall, I liked the whole "Scooby-Doo" tie-in. Make no mistake...it's not a copy or a new incarnation, only the set-up and purposeful character tropes that tie them together intentionally. Really enjoyed it. Won't win any awards, but the $3.99 rental price on Amazon was worth it to me.

For fans of slasher movies.

Other reviewers claimed that a missed opportunity to create a real life Scooby-Doo movie was missed. No it was not. There were already two made and that is more then enough. One reviewers contends it is not a copy of Scooby-Doo, Yes it is. For all intents and purposes, it is. The ONLY reason I would suspect The Evil Dead is mentioned is due to the amount of blood? Of course the blurb on the cover is a no name site and unknown person so why believe what is claimed? One could make a much better comparison. Yeah, they have a dog, so what?

The objective breakdown:

Cinematography: Less then average. Much of the film is shot in darkness. Camera seemed to have a great deal of difficulty in focusing. You will see many a shot not in focus. Shots are not properly framed. This occurs so frequently it is disturbing.

Sound: Average. Sound is clear and no difficulty discerning dialogue.

Music: Background music does not seem to fit the movie and is repetitious, loud and ingratiating after viewing for a period of time

Acting: Some are average. The actor playing the "Shaggy" character is horrid. The cop is not much better. It is amazing how much work some of these actors have in low, low budget er... movies, should I call them that?

Script: Predictable. This is suppose to be a parody. It is extremely obvious that the two writers attempted quite a bit of humor in the dialogue. The problem is, none of it is funny at all. The inability to write humor and the actors inability to deliver the lines properly is as painful as performing botched eye surgery upon one's self with a spatula. It fail completely what it sets out to do.

If one has absolutely nothing else to watch I guess one could watch this. There are SO many bad movies made it is like being hit by a tsunami. Regurgitation of the same film over and over makes me want to regurgitate.