DreamWorks Spooky Stories is broken up into multiple pieces. The main features are Scared Shrekless and Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space. Outside of those features, you get smaller stories that relate in some way to the their main counterparts.
Scared Shrekless has our favorite Shrek characters competing against each other to see who can tell the scariest Halloween story — inside of Lord Farquaad’s abandoned kingdom. What you get with this segment of the Blu-ray is a solidly animated tale that features some pretty darn good comedy from Shrek, Donkey, Puss-in-Boots, the Gingerbread Man and Pinocchio. My kids and I laughed our butts off at the story debacle from Donkey and Puss-in-Boots (they competed and combined their stories). We were a bit freaked out by the Gingerbread’s zombie/Misery story combination. That’s the real flavor to this particular tale, as it combines some scary elements, but balances them out with humor. It’s the first tale of the Blu-ray release and rightfully so, as it’s pretty darn funny.
In addition Scared Shrekless, you also get a short segment of the characters going through the ‘Thriller’ dance, which does justice to Michael Jackson’s hit music video. Beyond that, there are more Shrek stories on this release. One is about Lord Farquaad coming back from the dead to steal away Princess Fiona, while the other is about the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf (don’t want to ruin that one for you). The last two were entertaining, but not as well written as Scared Shrekless.
On the Monsters vs. Aliens side of things, you get some funny stories with this group. The first, and main story here is the Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space. An alien ship comes down to ‘dispose’ of some ‘liquid’ it needed to get rid of and it ends up splashing on a crop of pumpkins. The pumpkins become mutated and start terrorizing the town, so our five Monsters are called in to come help. While the pumpkins look terrifying once they’re mutated (picture a semi-rotten pumpkin with teeth), the real body of this story is the humor, as Bob the Blob steals the show.
Much like Shrek, there is an additional tale to be told, and it’s directly connected to the main story. After one of the pumpkins is smashed over a carrot garden, zombie carrots come alive and start biting people (turning them into zombies). The team must find a way to combat the carrots and return the town back to its normal human selves. It’s a great secondary story that is slightly more terrifying than the first. It’s packed with lots of humor, though.
Before we move on to the HD portion of this review, let me just add that the actors from the major motion pictures lend their voices for these specials (Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Reese Witherspoon, etc). You have to give some major kudos to DreamWorks for pulling that off on what basically are television shows. It adds continuity to the stories, as well as no questions about why Donkey (or whoever) sounds different. DreamWorks put a lot of effort into making these very much related to the movies; they did a great job.
As far as the Blu-ray goes, the quality is certainly down just a bit, but that’s probably due to the animation not having the same budget as a feature length film from the same characters. I can accept and understand that, but there are a few obvious moments where the quality of the animation really kind of comes down to an standard definition level. For example, the last tale of Lord Farquaad’s ghost returning to get Princess Fiona, the animation was pixelated and simple in comparison to the other stories. It really was obviously different, which makes the Blu-ray portion of this release a bit inconsistent. If DreamWorks had decided to leave out this particular story with the release then you get a very steady high-quality product. Anyway, overall the majority of what you get is certainly good enough for the Blu-ray format and looks pretty sharp in HD. Outside of the Lord Farquaad tale, you get clean, crisp, smooth animation that looks good on the Blu-ray format.
As for the features, you don’t get any true features (a pop-up option on one of the tales), but it’s a Halloween release. It would have been a steal of a deal if you did get some, but in my opinion it doesn’t hurt it overall (despite the score you may see).
