Saturday Morning Massacre

It's obvious what they were going for. A rated R, edgy horror Scooby Doo.

They basically just take everything (minus the dog) and ramp it up to 11 and that should be a blast and to be fair there are times where it is. The cheesey montages, the team coming together, the over the top cliches and some of the horror isn't even half bad.

But it's slow. It plods along, makes it painfully clear it's on a low budget and while the acting isn't bad, why'd they do that to Fred? Honestly it just isn't exciting. A great idea and one I hope gets another try in the future. This just didn't stick the landing.

"Saturday Morning Mystery" (formerly known as Saturday Morning Massacre- and Massacre is still the film's true form.) is a bizarre little indie flick directed by Spencer Parsons. The film stars Ashley Rae Spillers, Johnny Mars, Josephine Decker, Adam Tate and Paul Gordon. The story follows a crack pot team of paranormal investigators, much like the Scooby gang, who get hired to dispel the rumors and fears of locals around the paranormal activity at an estate. The group soon learn that there are much more sinister things hidden behind the walls of the Kyser schoolhouse. The gang choose to stay and solve the creepy behind the going-ons at the property, which proves to be in grave error. The decision to solve this mystery becomes a real massacre.

"Saturday Morning Mystery", (or Massacre) as I prefer to consider the film, is truly one of those strange films that blows you away. I had expected some cheesy, retro-throttled, low-budget spectacle. At the start there is a real throwback feel to the film which clearly became inspired by the cartoon mystery gang- only with the characters and their back-story though. Beyond that the similarities become terrifyingly obsolete. This is a real fright-fest fanfare story, with a way more sinister series of events than any cartoon show could think of inspiring. It becomes a truly gripping and nail-biting grindhouse horror story. The kitschy beginning and groovy build-up in this film has a cleverly darker intent. That intent is to throw you off guard, and then drag you into the pits of hellish nightmares as your nails tear off, and blood stained cries shatter the dark chilling air! This film is one of those rides into horror land that you will be glad you took. Think –The Scooby gangs accidentally wonder into the path of Stag Night kinfolk in a rural setting.

The story in this film is pretty well written and flows beautifully. There are a couple of moments that go off between dialog and scene portrayal. Actually only two that I remember seeming off was the "tab of acid" line and the "I totally have a jimmy in this bag" (or something like that.) There was no tabs taken-the drug leeched into the water cooler, and the character that said the line about the jimmy didn't have a bag on her in the scene. At least I didn't see one. Anyway those two moments – that is all-those two were the only milliseconds that slowed my totally pleasurable horror ride into this window to Hell. Pretty much every aspect of the film from cinematography to directed to soundtrack and kill scenes rocked in "Saturday Morning Mystery" You don't expect the intense vicious turn this film takes toward the last act but man it drags you in and sets you on the edge of the slaughtering blade of horror. This is truly one of the best indie horror films I have seen and a must for horror movie collectors.

Low budget B rated movie. Watch it for fun not for awards. It is what it is!

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.

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.