Late Night Cable Boredom

Last night at about 12:30, I was trying to sleep, but it wasn't happening, so I rolled into the living room to see what great adventures late night television had to offer. A couple of months ago, Meredith and I upgraded to the complete digital package. So, we have something like 52 or so movie channels now, and still nothing is ever on. Last night, or early this morining I guess, I had narrowed my choices down to "Van Helsing," yes it's bad, but it's perfect late night bad movie viewing, or "Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed," which I hadn't seen. I went for the latter. It's funny that late at night the fact that I have any of about 600 DVD's I could pop in never even was an option.

Anyways, "Scooby Doo" was of course just awful, but unfortunately I had to at least find out who the masked villain was, so I sat through an hour and a half of mind numbing bullshit to see Alicia Silverstone be the bad guy; although I guess it wasn't really her; it was a dude with an Alicia Silverstone mask on. Which made me wonder; wouldn't you pick a hotter or at least better actress mask to don? Maybe Jennifer Anniston or Jennifer Connoly. They wouldn't be caught dead doing this movie, but I still wondered.

What really got me about this movie was that James Gunn wrote it; he also wrote the original. I remember after seeing the equally bad first film, I heard Gunn was writing the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, and I was pissed off and annoyed to say the least. But then "Dawn of the Dead" ended up being really good, and not just because of the direction or acting; it was a hell of a script. It was witty, dark, and very well paced. The Scooby Doo movies are the exact opposite. And I've always heard that the original script for the first "Scooby Doo" was actually pretty damn funny and the studio and director, Raja Gosnel,l butchered it. Gunn was adamantly upset about all of this. Apparently he just wasn't too upset to take the three million to write the second one. There's not much of a point here, but it annoys me to think that Gunn is really a talented writer wasting his time on the Scooby Doo shit. Of course, the second one didn't really make that much money, so they probably won't be making a third one, or maybe I'm wrong.Who knows? But if they do, maybe they'll let Ehren Krueger or Joe Esterhaz write it, so Gunn can actually concentrate on projects that are worthy of his time.