I was never a fan of the Open Season franchise, in fact, I didn’t even like most of those films aside from the first one. However, credit where credit is due, the films were super funny and they kept things quite cheerful for the most part. The problem came with the release of Open Season 3, which was one of the most jarring viewing experiences for me. The film lacked the heart, charisma, and even humor that kept these films above ground, so I wasn’t going in with a lot of expectations into this fourth installment. Safe to say, it wasn’t the worst film in the franchise by far, and a significant upgrade over the third.
How to Download Open Season: Scared Silly
You can download the film from a digital store. You can also stream it. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and make your choice.
The Movie Review
The plot is largely the same as it usually is, a character will have a persistent phobia or perpetual love for a certain thing and leave the forest. Then, their furry friends will embark on an epically small journey to follow them and bring them back to the safety of the forest. Boog is the focus in Open Season: Scared Silly. He’s downright terrified when he learns that there’s a werewolf that is terrorizing the forest where he and his friends call their home. However, all of his pals attempt to support him in overcoming this fear, so they decide to locate the rumored mythical beast when Boog decides to flee.
Another day, another installment of Open Season, and at this point, it’s a bit hard to justify why these films are even being made. If you consider the fact that the original film had a budget of $85 Million, this film has 15 times less than that, at a measly $5.5 Million. Sony just chooses to open its wallets every once in a while, and orders any vacant studios in their animation lineup to make another Open Season film. This time around, they’ve changed the voice actors (AGAIN) and they’ve got less humor than the first two. Lucky for them though, the third film was so bad that anything slightly better feels like a decent upgrade.
However, Sony should simply give up on this franchise if they can’t really pay up with the budget. There are major continuity errors in this one, which I couldn’t really agree with for the most part but found tolerable after a while. This film is not very funny, that’s something you will just have to accept. If Open Season 3 was one of the least funny films of all time, this one is slightly better than that. There are a few jokes here and there that land, but the rest of them are just placeholders that somehow made it to the final cut.
They’ve changed the voice actors, again. It’s not the first time that this series has done this but it’s the time it has felt the most jarring by far. Boog feels fine to hear actually, even though his character is in complete shambles despite all of the character development he’s gotten over the years. However, Elliot feels very off to hear, he sounds like a drunk version of Ashton Kutcher, which is saying something because he usually sounds fine even when he’s acting drunk.
The animation is rushed though, and that too quite aggressively. The movement feels too fast as if this was for an 8-minute TV cartoon episode. This is a problem, considering that they had barely any budget, they did do a decent job, but Sony not paying up their creators to make something genuinely good is heartbreaking. Moreover, this franchise was never known for its music anyways, which makes this film feel even less grand on an overall presentation scale.
Verdict
In conclusion, the only defining factors of these films were their comedy and their uniquely quirky art style. The two are present here, there are bursts of greatness just waiting to be let out, but they’re never fully integrated into the film at any moment. As of yet, Open Season: Scared Silly is just another underwhelming experience. It does improve on Open Season 3, but with an improvement, that minute, does it even matter?
