Loch Ness Terror (2008)
"It's hunt or be hunted."
Plot
James Murphy is a crypto zoologist who, when he was twelve, accompanied his father on an expedition to find the Loch Ness monster. They had a fatal encounter with the creature and his father was killed. Thirty years later, his search for Nessie leads him to the town of Pike Island on Lake Superior. He hires a local guide to take him a trip across the lake where he hopes to prove the existence of the creature, now responsible for a series of local deaths.
Quite why this is called Loch Ness Terror when it's got little to do with Loch Ness and is set in a lake in North America is about a big a mystery as Nessie herself. It's almost as if the writers were just shamelessly using the famous legend for their own financial purposes rather than coming up with something original. Maybe they thought an American audience would be too dumb to understand Scottish accents so gave Nessie a green card and shipped her off to the States. "If we can't go to you, you'll come to us" logic. That aside, Loch Ness Terror is yet another of the Sci-Fi Channel's ‘monster on the loose’ films where they pretty much throw the same story into the grinder, only with a different monster of the week. Pterodactyls, sabretooth tigers, sharks, snakes and a whole lot more have been given their own features so it was obvious that one of life's most infamous monsters is given the spotlight. Whether you believe the story about the Loch Ness monster or not doesn't really matter here. All you need to know is that it's a big-ass dinosaur and so the Sci-Fi Channel was obviously going to put their own spin on it.
I'll be honest, I found Loch Ness Terror semi-decent, arguably in the channel's top five creature features. Maybe it's because I've seen too many snakes, sharks and everyday animals be mutated, genetically enhanced or just set loose to really give a damn anymore. But a new monster gives hope for a few new ideas to freshen up the stale formula and at least give us some underlying chance that the rule book may be re-written. I think that the hope of seeing something different kept me going right until the end when I realised no one at the Sci-Fi Channel is that smart to change the formula of their previous hundred monster films. Loch Ness Terror runs like clockwork - subtract one prehistoric monster and put in a crocodile, snake or any other monster and it works just the same - preferably something aquatic. One of the big groans I have with it is the fact that Nessie spends more time plodding around on land than in the water. If they were going to do that in the first place, why bother with Nessie? Why not just pick some land-based monster?
Thankfully this Nessie isn't the gentle giant that she's been made out to be in real life - this one will bite you in half and spit out the bits she doesn't want to eat. She will kill and eat anyone or anything in her path. So needless to say the film has plenty of moments of gore although most of them don't fit in well with the CGI monster. In one scene, Nessie bites the head off her victim but the resulting CGI blood splash is so badly animated that I had to watch it again to make sure what happened. Nessie is well fed however and there's a reasonably well-paced stream of attacks and incidents to keep viewers hooked into the admittedly flimsy story. The CGI for the monster is serviceable; you'll see a lot worse in this type of TV movie and at least we get to see plenty of it. Loch Ness Terror has plenty of energy and zip to it, livening up the on-screen carnage far more than you'd expect for such an offering - you can't complain you don't get your money's worth in this one.
If you've seen Lake Placid then you will probably be more at home here than any of the other Sci-Fi Channel pictures. The setting is the same with British Colombia looking every bit as grey and dull as it did previously. There are pretty similar characters too. All this needed was some smart-ass like Brendan Gleason or animal nut like Oliver Platt squirming around. The cast do what they can with their shallow roles. Brian Krause is pretty decent in the lead role as the crypto zoologist with a burning desire to get even. Everyone else lives up to stereotypes and thus their place in the death line can be quickly assessed from their first scenes. There's no one you desperately want to see gobbled up by Nessie or her kids; likewise there's no one you can really hope survives until the end.
I have to laugh at the end of Loch Ness Terror. The poor deputy (I marked him as Nessie-bait as soon as he set off with the main characters to hunt for the monster) is savaged and killed by Nessie's offspring. But in the final rolls, the remaining characters gather around and start cracking jokes and planning for the future, seemingly unaware that the man who just saved their lives has been brutally butchered by a plesiosaur! Show a bit of respect for crying out loud!
Final Verdict
I hate to admit this but Loch Ness Terror was a pretty fun, entertaining but shallow ride which certainly blasted the rest of the Sci-Fi Channel's movies out of the water. It's got plenty of Nessie action, has a decent pace and above all didn't completely suck in all of the major departments. A step in the right direction for Sci-Fi.
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Loch Ness Terror Also Known As: Beyond Loch Ness Director(s): Paul Ziller Writer(s): Andrew Sands (story), Paul Ziller (screenplay), Jason Bourque (screenplay) Actor(s): Brian Krause, Niall Matter, Don S. Davis, Donnelly Rhodes, Carrie Genzel, Amber Borycki, Paul McGillion Duration: 91 mins |  |
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