The Loch Ness Horror (1982)

Must See Movie...

Did you people see the same film I saw?

As Good As It Gets

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

You can guarantee Americans to make a movie that plays up to ethnic stereotypes . It's interesting to see that Hollywood rarely makes films set in present day Germany possibly because they're shocked that's there's a famine of goosestepping Nazis . Not so Celtic nations where the IRA are gallant freedom fighters or Scotland where the Clans are united in fighting for freedom led by an American born Aussie with his face painted blue . If nothing else then a film featuring the Loch Ness Monster produced in America should be worth watching just for a laugh . The bad news is this film isn't even bad enough to qualify for guilty pleasure material From the opening scene nothing about this film feels accurate as we see yachts sailing around in the background and a couple of American scientists lament that " The broads here don't put out unless you marry them " which leads me to believe no one is trying in any context within or outside the film to paint an accurate picture of Scotland Within moments one of the scientists ends up as a light lunch for Nessie and the surviving scientist makes his way to shore where strangely he doesn't contact the police to let them know that his colleague has just been eaten . Is this to convey how greedy he is and how he might come a cropper at a later stage ? Make your own mind up It's not enough to just make a simple film with a simple premise about the Loch Ness Monster and the plotting deviates all over the place where in turns it becomes a thriller and has a subplot about an old German plane conveniently lying at the bottom of Loch Ness as if the producers have got fed up with the main plot and want to introduce an Alistair Maclean story Being Scottish I can promise you that none of the accents are close to resembling any Scottish accent I have heard and the accents sound like an American putting on a fake English accent while trying to sound Irish as in " OH'll shut yoo with this goon lassie " . Despite being set in 1981 it features Scottish soldiers wearing 1950s battle dress armed with guns that were obviously bought from a toy shop and when you've got a film this amateurish you know what to expect from the monster which resembles a paper maiche glove puppet

I think this is one of those few movies that I want to rate it as low as possible just to pay it a compliment.I haven't seen this movie in about 25 years, so I really can't say that much about it. It still seems to be very hard to find on video. But I remember my brother and I stumbled upon it somewhere in the toxic brew of late night UHF channel television of the mid 1980s when I was about 10 years old. So I've never actually seen the beginning of the movie, but I saw most of it. The first thing I remember is this couple is sneaking out of a campsite and they're rowing to an island to make out, and then they get attacked by an insane Scotsman in a kilt with an axe! They manage to escape from him but get attacked by the Loch Ness Monster, which in this movie is just a head and a neck with no body. The eyes and the mouth of the monster don't even move, it looks like a piñata.I mean I had just literally never seen anything on this magnitude before and it totally blew my mind. I had seen some bad movies on TV in the early 80s but I had never seen something so totally inept and so casually and thoughtlessly constructed that it seemed like the people who made it spent less time and effort on it than we did watching it. I had already seen some of the Troma films and that type of thing that tries to deliberately be "campy", but this was the pure and real stuff and it was my first encounter with truly great bad film-making. This movie was like the last gasp of the drive-in era and I caught a whiff of it just in time. Actually when we were watching it, we couldn't figure out if it was made in the 50s or the 70s. Turns out it came out just a few years before I saw it.Later I came into contact with Mystery Science Theater and found out about a lot of the old B movies and serials, but I had already seen it in this movie. The movie is so funny that I had never even laughed that hard at the Monty Python crew or Bill Murray or any comedian. After seeing this movie I was always trying to search for the "good bad" movies and I got a lot of my friends into it. But this movie was and basically is an impossible one to find. I never really found out what it even was or who Larry Buchanan was until the 1990s when IMDb took off and the internet took off and information started getting passed around. But this movie still needs to be discovered by a lot of others who might appreciate its transcendentally bad qualities. Look for it.

If it wasn't for Loch Ness we would never see such corny delights about Nessie. Larry Buchanan's take on this Scottish legend is quite entertaining at times as movies about monsters made of plastic can be. The fake is hilarious, the fake Scottish accents are funny. The kill-scenes cracked me up. I also loved the fact that there were more American tourists and Nessie-hunters from Houston, Tx invading Loch Ness then actual locals living there. Still, this film never reaches the cheesy heights the classic trailer promises. Not a total loss though, makes a cool double feature along with THE CRATER LAKE MONSTER (1977).

**Possible Spoilers Ahead**Whenever fans of bad movies congregate for more than a few minutes, a name that invariably comes up is that of Larry Buchanan. This amazing director has given us remakes of other turkeys (ZONTAR THE THING FROM VENUS), cheap-jack crime dramas like A BULLET FOR PRETTY BOY, and tawdry conspiracy flicks like DOWN ON US and GOODBYE NORMA JEAN. THE LOCH NESS HORROR is a humdinger to say the least. Overlooking the fact that Loch Ness is extremely long and narrow, Larry filmed this howler on a wide and round California lake. Early on, the film boasts some dazzling (for the budget) underwater photography and creates some atmosphere in spite of itself. Then it degenerates into windy dialogue uttered by no-name actors with lapsing Scottish accents, not to mention a soundtrack that will do nothing for the much-maligned bagpipe. At one point, campers sing "You Take The High Road, I'll Take The Low Road," just to throw in one more Scottish cliche. If Scottish people ever decide to jump on the Political Correctness bandwagon they'll sue Larry Buchanan over this film, his surname notwithstanding. The monster looks like a giant papier-mache puppet and it makes the dragon in Beanie & Cecil look terrifying by comparison. In one unforgettable scene Nessie takes to land and, to evade some patrolling soldiers, the fifty-foot long critter tries to hide behind a tree-and the soldiers don't see it! THE LOCH NESS HORROR is a true mind-boggler that must be seen-several times--to be believed.