Movie Review: Scooby Doo! Stage Fright (2013)

Matthew Lillard, Mindy Cohn, Wayne Brady and John O'Hurley all lend their voices to this animated movie.

My wife and I are celebrating our 12th wedding anniversary today and, as part of that, paid for a pedicure appointment for her. While she was at that appointment, my oldest daughter and I took the time to watch this movie.

We've both seen it in the past. However, it has been a while and we didn't remember that much about it. And, when we watched it today, we realized it is easily one of the best Scooby Doo movies we've seen.

The thing I really liked about this movie is the mystery. At first, I figured the Phantom's identity would be easy to figure out, as is usually the case with Scooby Doo mysteries. As it turns out, it was much more difficult than we realized. This is because the writers were pretty clever when it came to the villain and threw in a pretty surprising twist that neither of us was expecting and made it much more difficult to pinpoint who exactly was behind the attacks and why.

In fact, there were a couple of times when I thought I knew who the villain was only to have my theory be seemingly debunked by the person being in the room at the same time as the Phantom or have different clues point to different people. My daughter, who is actually better at solving these mysteries than I am, was just as confused.

One thing I wasn't a huge fan of when it came to this movie was some of the violence, which seemed to be a bit too extreme for a kids' movie.

In particular, one scene I thought was a little intense was when Fred was battling the Phantom up in the catwalks of the opera house and the Phantom tried to burn his face with a blow torch. Maybe it's just the parent in me creeping out, but that did seem to be a little too violent for an animated movie geared toward younger kids.

As I said before, there are some scenes in this movie that I would caution parents about if they have younger kids watching it. However, overall, I did think this was a very entertaining film that had a pretty decent mystery. I know I enjoyed watching it with my daughter and do think this is a movie that is worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

My Grade: A