Scarygirl (2024) review

Dir. Ricard Cussó and Tania Vincent

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

When was the last time you took a chance and saw a movie in theaters you knew nothing about? It’s one of life’s most fun gambles, but it’s also one of the riskiest. I’ve been burned by this more times than the lottery and blackjack combined, and while I’ll continue to do it, and encourage others to do the same, I must admit it often requires monk-like patience.

Scarygirl arrives in theaters with little publicity and fanfare. The film is actually based on a fairly popular 2012 platformer that enjoyed a long life on both PlayStation and Xbox Live’s respective arcade hubs. Before the video game, it was a series of graphic novels from Australian animator Nathan Jurevicius, who sought to create a different kind of female protagonist: one that served as an antithesis to Barbie, but still harbored her own likable charm. That creation became “Scarygirl,” a Goth girl who looks like she was assembled from odds and ends found from various Hammer Horror films. She boasts an eye-patch, a black hat emblazoned with a skull, and a stitched mouth with a tentacle with a hook at the end as one arm, and a protruding bone as another.

“Scarygirl,” known as Arkie (voiced by Jillian Nguyen) in the film adaptation, has underwent a bit of a makeover since her video-game and novel days. One of her arms is a simple tentacle (she’s basically an anthropomorphized octopus) and the other harbors a hook. Her personality was ostensibly drained in transition, for Arkie doesn’t reflect her garb whatsoever. One look at her and you’d expect someone with a personality like Winona Ryder’s Lydia from Beetlejuice. Instead, she’s impossibly chipper, almost cloyingly so, and her catchphrase (“nothing to do it but to do it”) is as cheesy as they come.

The utterly messy plot involves her octopus father, Blister (Rob Collins), being kidnapped by a sinister baddie (Sam Neill), who needs octopi in order to create his lost daughter, Chihoohoo, which involves some cockamamie process of harvesting electricity. Arkie and her dad use electricity to help revive plants found in their Peninsula. When Arkie teams up with a rabbit named Bunniguru (Remy Hii) and his egg-partner, named Egg, of course, one of the film’s most significant missteps becomes clear: the main character is so bland that these two almost effectively steal the movie right from under her. Bunniguru looks a bit like Buster Baxter from Arthur, with a matching personality, and while Egg remains mostly silent, her reactive expressions are adorable.

Although clearly not flush with cash like their mainstream American counterparts in Pixar and DreamWorks, Cosmic Dino Studio effectively makes Scarygirl a madcap visual marvel. Its character designs are varied, and its landscapes recall everything from steampunk, Tim Burton-esque Gothic influence, and post-apocalyptic scenery that feels approachable thanks to its bright colors. Clip any sequence from Scarygirl and you’ll likely be smitten with its varied stylings. If only the writers were on the same page. This is a film that mistakes its diverse animated backdrops and vibrant colors for creativity, and the plot is such a disaster, complete with overly complicated character names, that it’s difficult to keep track of what the end goal is for each character in any given scene.

It was probably always destined to be difficult to turn what was a novelty series into a compelling feature. That difficulty reveals itself in a movie that’s too complicated for young children and ultimately too unserious and tame for anyone older. Even the film’s title feels like a misrepresentation. This is more of an action-adventure fantasy than a work of accessible horror for kids; another missed opportunity for a picture that misses an awful lot despite being under 90 minutes long.

Voiced by: Jillian Nguyen, Rob Collins, Remy Hii, Tim Minchin, Sam Neill, Deborah Mailman, and Liv Hewson. Directed by: Ricard Cussó and Tania Vincent.