Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island (2019)

Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island arrives twenty-one years after the original, which in the direct-to-video economy qualifies as a legacy sequel. The gang has retired from mystery solving at the insistence of a local sheriff, then wins a tropical vacation that deposits them on an island bearing an uncanny resemblance to Moonscar, the site of their earlier ordeal. Zombies shamble, were-cats prowl, and a director named Alan Smithee eventually confesses that the resort is his movie set. The plot is assembled from recycled parts, and it seems content with that.

For our purposes, the film is a vacuum. The cast is the familiar ensemble, voiced with professional competence, and no character's identity is examined, revised, or asked to carry a message. Velma consults her unsolved mysteries blog. Daphne remains resourceful. Neither is deployed in service of an argument about gender. The zombies are people in rubber masks, the treasure is gold-foil Scooby Snacks, and the cats are cats. There is no indictment of the studio system that produced the thing, which is a wasted opportunity given that the villain is a film director named after a Hollywood pseudonym for disowned work. The film declines to bite that hand.

Left over is craft of a modest order: a harvest moon, a cave riddled with convenient holes, a monster truck version of the Mystery Machine, and Cassandra Peterson reprising her Elvira persona with the timing of a professional. The animation is serviceable, the scares are gentle, and the resolution restores the status quo with a sheriff's grudging permission. Nothing here advances a social argument, and nothing here pretends to. The needle does not move. Some vintages are simply table wine, and this one is content to be poured for children at a birthday party.