(courtesy IMDB (c) Warner Bros. Family Entertainment)
Halloween would not be Halloween without Scooby-Doo! somewhere in the hauntingly spooky and hilariously freaky mix and, of course, solving a great mystery which in the case of 1999’s Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost is literally bewitching one quaint New England town.
The normally peaceful, barely-trafficked town of Oakhaven is beset by a screaming, glowing green witchy spectre, supposed a woman named Sarah Ravencroft who was condemned as a wicth some 400 years earlier and who’s determined to enact revenge on a world that treated her very poorly indeed.
Or so her descendant, famous horror writer Ben Ravencroft, believes.
He maintains at every turn that Sarah was a sweet innocent healer of the sickly poor, a woman who gave of herself to care for the people of then newly-established town who couldn’t afford normal medical services and needed a Florence Nightingale of sorts to keep them hale and hearty.
It’s a he said-history says kind of deal and Ben, who’s a hero of Velma (B. J. Ward), is adamant that his ancestor is just a misunderstood woman of selflessly caring means; the ghost says otherwise however and it’s up to Velma, Fred and Daphne (Frank Welker and Mary Kay Bergman respectively) and naturally Scooby-Doo and Shaggy (Scott Innes) to get to the bottom of things before Oakhaven is terrorised any further.
Unless, of course, it’s that Oakhaven wants to be terrorised?
Something fishy is going on with Mayor Corey (Scott Innes) skulking around town in the dead of night, picking up packages and delivering them, all while a very scary vampire-teethed girlband, the Hex Girls, are playing some goth songs at the town’s festival.
Something isn’t right, and in amongst the usual montages of everyone running from the baddie of the movie/episode, in this case a very scary witch flying through the air, to the Scooby-Doo! song sung by billy Ray Cyrus, and Scooby and Shaggy eating frightening big amounts of food, it’s up to the Mystery Gang to get to the bottom of things and stop another creepy ghoul in their tracks who will, inevitably and to claps of glee from viewers, exclaim, “And I would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”
Actually the twist is that that phrase doesn’t get used quite in the way it normally is which proves that people behind Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost, and the franchise generally, aren’t afraid to have fun with the characters or go all meta on many of the beloved tropes that make the show so much heartwarmingly kooky fun to watch.
We get a “Zoinks!” and a “Jinkies!” naturally, and Scooby and Shaggy accidentally helping the mystery solving cause and we get some bad guys that turn out to be not quite as bad as you might have imagined.
But, and here’s the fun part with Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost, and indeed the franchise as a whole of late which has shown a willingness to have some real supernatural shenanigans in with the orchestrated ones – it brings in some real evil this time with the final part of the made-for-TV movie featuring the gang and the people of the town battling some pretty powerful forces who mean them, and the world some harm.
It’s not exactly world-ending horror, and even as everyone races in slapstick intense fashion to keep a particular artefact from the evil creature du jour, we get the customary hilarity that we’ve come to expect from Scooby-Doo! which knows how to dish up the scares but in a way that the horror-averse, like this reviewer, can actually handle.
As with all the Mystery Gang adventures, there’s some minor character development – Fred almost tells Daphne he likes her and Velma is outed as a massive horror fan who loses all good sense around her author hero – but mostly Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost goes all out to serve up a scary apparition, some fun-filled chase scenes and a whodunnit which is not that complex but which gives enough of a buzz for some minor sleuthing supernatural derring-do to be done.
If you like your Halloween to be scary within limits, and to serve ghosts and witches in ways that won’t keep you up at night and which come packaged with some nostalgically warm-and-fuzzy laughs then Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost is your ticket to some cope-able frights this Halloween, the kind that will send some adrenaline flying through your Scooby Snacks-fuelled system and follow it up, just as swiftly with some real laughs, a big reveal and a lovely sense of justice being served and the world returned to its customarily terrifying ordinary self.