Ruh-Roh Reviews is here to review all the full-length animated Scooby-Doo movies in chronological order (according to Wikipedia) from Scooby-Doo! Meets the Boo Brothers (1987) right through to the present!
Ruh-Roh Reviews is back for its second instalment, and this time we’re looking at perhaps my favourite Scooby-Doo movie growing up, Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School (1988). Following on in the same style as Scooby-Doo! Meets the Boo Brothers (1987), this adventure only features Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy in a van very similar to but not quite the same as the classic Mystery Machine.
This time around, Shaggy has just taken a new job as a gym teacher at a finishing school for girls, and his two canine companions have come along as emotional support and professional assistance. Of course, they show up in the middle of the night in the midst of a thunderstorm, and soon discover that Miss Grimwood’s Finishing School for Girls is actually a school for ghouls, which, of course, isn’t ideal for our favourite cowards.
Alongside Miss Cackle, her Addams Family-esque hand number two, and her pet dragon, the school is home to the daughters of some of the horror world’s most well-known monsters! We have Sibella (Dracula’s daughter), Elsa (Frankenstein’s monster’s daughter), Winnie (the Wolfman’s daughter), Phantasma (the Phantom’s daughter), and Tanis (the Mummy’s daughter).
While we have a lot more female monster representation these days, most of the original Universal Monsters lineup featured male monster. So the pupils of Miss Grimwood’s school are a delightful addition to the genre. I grew up with this movie, so it was great to see girl monsters still being scary and fierce when they need to be, but not having to fall into the sexy role that female monsters are so often confined to.
The main reason that Shaggy has been hired as a gym teacher is to help the girls get ready for their annual volleyball match against the neighbouring Calloway Military Academy, which the ghouls usually lose. And it’s surprising how much of the 92-minute runtime the volleyball match actually takes up!
Considering how important the match is to the ghouls, it seems they’ve hired Shaggy only a couple of days before the event is due to take place. And considering Shaggy doesn’t have the most experience in the area, I’m not sure how much good Shaggy is expected to do to help the girls win. But, in the face to adversity, the ghouls manage to pull together, and show the cheating Calloway boys that they are the better team.
Volleyball aside, the main spooky plot of the movie surrounds the evil witch Revolta and her sidekick, the Grim Creeper, who looks like a potato with one eye and a lot of tentacles. Revolta wants to kidnap the ghouls, turn them evil, and use them for her evildoing to finally prove that she’s more powerful than the girls’ fathers. Her plan involves her trusty spiderbats, who can spin a magical pair of headphones onto their intended victims, which causes them to be under Revolta’s control. After using Shaggy to lure the girls to the Barren Bog, she manages to capture all of them, meaning it’s left to Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy to save the day!
Rewatching this again as an adult, I forgot how little of the movie is dedicated to the main villain and how much time we spend with the really annoying cadets and the volleyball game. I’m glad that the ghouls got the win over the judgemental boys, but the monster daughters were always a tight-knit group who worked well as a team and neither group really learned anything from the battle.
The storyline with Revolta is much more interesting, but I can see why it might not have stretched for an entire movie. However, the mirror monster sequence in Revolta’s lair still remains one of my favourites. It’s always nice to see a properly creepy moment in a Scooby-Doo movie to keep younger horror fans on their toes.
In fact, overall the monster design in this movie is fantastic. It’s lovely to the see the classic monster dads get their time on screen during the school’s Halloween party, but each of the ghoul daughters looks amazing. I especially love Sibella’s purple colour pallet and her cute bat counterpart, even if it does mean that she makes bat and fang-tastic puns at every given opportunity.
The climax of the fight with Revolta is a little underwhelming. Because she’s a real monster she can’t just be unmasked and carted away by the police, but equally, because this is an early Scooby-Doo movie, they’re not going to kill the bad guys off either. We have to wait for movies like Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) before we get a kickass ending like that.
I do think it’s sad that the ending sees Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy fleeing from the school when three new ghouls show up to start studying. After their initial fear over the ghouls, Shaggy and Scooby seemed to be getting on well with the girls. They even head to Revolta’s lair of their own will to rescue them. But in the end their fear of monsters gets the better of them, and rather than bond with the new girls as they did the old group, they leave quickly. They don’t even wish the ghouls a proper goodbye. Terrible behaviour.
Overall, I have a lot of fond memories of this movie, but it’s not quite the perfect story I judged it to be as a kid. However, I am glad to see that the movies decided to continue the trend of using real monsters. And this time around we get some proper scary monsters as the bad guys, rather than it still being a criminal in search of infinite wealth.
I did miss the rest of the Scooby Gang though and I think it would have been lovely to see Velma and Daphne interact with the ghouls. I think Sibella and Daphne could have boned over the preference for purple.
I think this is still one of my favourite Scooby-Doo stories, but I do wish we spent a little more time on the creepy side of things rather the school rivalry.
REVIEW SCORE – 4/5
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