Loch Ness Monster Movies (Part 1 of 2)

Everyone has heard of the Loch Ness Monster. It is one of the most famous cryptids (animals theorized to exist but lacking scientific evidence to prove their existence) and stories have been told about this mysterious creature dating all the way back to 7^th century Scotland. I was lucky enough to visit Loch Ness this year and look for Nessie myself, but aside from the generic tourist pic featured above, I did not get a single shot of anything that looked like a lake monster. I always assumed part of the reason Scotland’s most famous legend became known worldwide was due to the all the movies made about it—and yet, when I began to research Hollywood films about the monster, I was surprised to find there are not very many.

The idea of a prehistoric creature still living beneath that deep, dark water is intriguing, and unsettling. I am going to primarily look at flicks in the horror genre that have tapped the monster movie potential of this enduring legend, mostly in order of release date, with a few detours into some adjacent genres. In the early 1930s there was a spike in reported sightings, and right around that time was when the first feature film about Scotland’s monster was made. The Secret of the Loch (1934) was more likely produced due to the success of King Kong the year before than because of increased publicity. A grumpy old professor swears there is a creature in the loch; it’s commonly believed to be a plesiosaur, but he identifies it as a surviving member of the long-neck Diplodocus species. Most people are skeptical of the validity of these claims, but a reporter from London is sent to Scotland and he becomes a believer (while also falling for the professor’s granddaughter).  

Unfortunately, this first cinematic outing for Nessie cannot stay afloat. The characters are annoying, there are too many goofy scenes that are just filler to pad out the already short runtime, and the creature is not shown until the very end, when the reporter dives to the lake bottom and finally sees the secret revealed. Despite being described as a long-neck dinosaur, it’s portrayed as a giant lizard, made to appear giant by dangling a tiny replica of the diver in front of a real iguana. The monster comes up to the surface and proves its existence to the professor and others aboard the vessel, who are overjoyed, then it just ends. There’s a total lack of suspense or intrigue throughout, and not much more to say. The only other notable thing about it is the editor: David Lean. Who is he? Just a guy who went on direct a few movies, one of which was Lawrence of Arabia.

As disappointing as the first Loch Ness Monster movie was, it did establish some tropes that became staples of many other fictional tales of such creatures: locals who know the legend is true, scientists who believe in the seemingly impossible only to be proven right, reporters trying to get the inside scoop, and people getting eaten. The next movie to make a villain out of Nessie didn’t come along until the 1980’s: a staggering 47 years later! The Loch Ness Horror (1981) seems appropriately titled, but this evidently low budget production is all over the place in terms of plot. The military is trying to recover a Nazi fighter plane that sunk in the loch during WWII, which is even more fictional than Nessie herself. There are scientists in search of the monster, too, and one of the monster’s eggs comes into play, which I guess is what spurs her into a killing spree after having avoided people for thousands of years, but she has the standards of a true slasher villain: she only kills immoral folk and spares pure, virginal women.

Secret of the Loch is bad, but it’s a mostly bland relic of monster cinema. The Loch Ness Horror is truly terrible. It begins with a Scotsman looking through a telescope out at the plane destined to sink in the loch, and somehow, he is looking down at the plane as if he’s higher than it is, despite being in his house on the lakeshore. Even more miraculous is when he tilts the telescope and instantly spies Nessie! We get a pretty good look at her head and neck with this early appearance, and those body parts are all we ever see of her because that’s all the special effects crew were able to make. The performances are awful (producer/co-writer/director Larry Buchanan recruited several family members to help out with production), with some horrendous Scottish accents, but I could have gotten over that had the monster delivered. She appears just often enough amid dull (though sometimes hilariously bad) dialogue scenes to keep the cheese flowing. Most of the deaths are bloodless and unintentionally comical. Her roar occasionally sounds like the TIE fighter from Star Wars, and she sometimes expels so much hot breath from her toothy mouth, it looks like she’s vaping.

Lake Tahoe was the actual filming location, and is it obvious? I don’t want to be that annoying nerd who pushes his glasses up his nose and says, “well actually!” but I will this time, because Loch Ness is not full of clear blue water (it has brown, dark water stained from the peat in the surrounding soil) and it is not surrounded by dry, dusty shores with sparse alpine trees (the sides of the loch drop straight down, making it very deep and very unlike the way it looks in this movie!), but hey, at least they included bagpipes on the soundtrack to remind us of Scotland. When this movie tries to be scary, it comes off as funny or awkward. When the scientists try to speak intelligently, they make glaring mistakes like saying otters “are not aquatic,” and when it tries to do the horror tropes, like having two teens fooling around and getting killed, it feels very amateurish and tame. The Loch Ness Horror? More like The Loch Ness Bore-er.

The Nessie prop from that production was used in the next movie I want to explore, although it isn’t classified as horror, but I’m not sure when else I’ll have an opportunity to cover something as random as Amazon Women on the Moon (1987). Essentially a collection of sketches, it is a tribute to/parody of old school late-night TV and the kind of low-budget 1950s sci-fi movies that used to be broadcast on cable. Scenes from the film-within-the-film are shown amid the unseen viewer switching to other channels, showing fictional ads and shows. The segments (21 total, varying in length) were directed by five different directors, including Joe Dante, John Landis, and Carl Gottleib, with a slew of celebrities appearing throughout, such as Arsenio Hall, Michelle Pfieffer, and Griffin Dunne. Some bits are dated, but many are still blisteringly funny, and do not hold back. “Mondo Condo” is gleefully cartoony, “Penthouse Video” has such absurd levels of nudity it becomes hilarious, and “Son of the Invisible Man” takes the simple concept of someone thinking he’s invisible when he really isn’t and running with it, to highly entertaining results.

Like with any sketch film or anthology film, there are inconsistencies and a mix of highlights and lowlights, but one of the highlights is the “Bullshit or Not?” segment directed by Joe Dante, which postulates that Jack the Ripper was actually…The Loch Ness Monster! Using “undiscovered evidence” they show a re-creation of Victoria-era London with Nessie, dressed in an oversized kilt, jacket, tie, and hat, take an unsuspecting harlot into a back alley, where she is killed off-screen. It’s amazing how the same movie prop can look so different under different lighting and in different circumstances. In The Loch Ness Horror, the Nessie head appears clumsy and almost kind of cute, but was pretty functional for being a low budget creation, and here it actually looks a tad creepy, and even…oh, who am I kidding? It still looks hilariously terrible. But, at least it’s supposed to be funny in this instance!

The next Loch Ness horror movie of note is Beneath Loch Ness (2001). It tells the same kind of story we’ve seen many times before: scientists investigating the loch discover the monster and must gather evidence in order to prove what they know is true. The team leader is killed at the beginning, and a different guy who used to be part of the team is called in to take over the operation, with funding from a TV producer who wants the exclusive footage of whatever they find. In an effort to give the plot a twist, they find the creature dead and washed up on shore long before the climax, but after some further investigating, they find out nope, the real Nessie is still out there and needs to be stopped. While Secret of the Loch was bad but innocently so, and Loch Ness Horror was bad but amusingly so at times, Beneath Loch Ness is absolute trash.

Once again, a lake that is clearly not in Scotland at all is passed off as the real Loch Ness. The acting is bad, the dialogue is bad, there’s a lack of continuity or logic, and the whole production is offensive not just to Scottish people but the entirety of Scotland itself. The accents are abysmal, the team calls the “Coast Guard” in the first few minutes, and their police outfits look like the kind of American police outfits you would buy from a costume shop. Worst of all? The monster itself. This creature doesn’t have any of the charm of a shoddy puppet, because it’s a cheaply rendered CGI atrocity, and they couldn’t even afford to animate it for more than a few shots, so some of the shots are reused and obscured in darkness. I can’t even say they had the sense to make the waters of the loch dark in this case, because it clearly was not intended to make it more authentic. I can’t get that worked up about this one since it was a hastily made, straight-to-video, watch-it-once-and-forget-it kind of flick, but it continues the downward trend of the Scottish monster being the subject of ever worse horror films, and has the worst special effects of any of them so far—even worse than Secret of the Loch. Now that is pathetic.  

I’m concluding this first part with a movie from my childhood, Scooby-Doo! and the Loch Ness Monster (2004), which is the only animated feature I’m looking at. Scooby-Doo has been an early gateway into horror for many kids throughout the past five-plus decades. This seventh direct-to-video Scooby flick was not the first time the gang had run into such a creature. In “The Lochness Mess,” which was the final episode of the first season of The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972) they visit Shaggy’s uncle and have to deal with three ghosts plus a sea serpent (with the help of the Harlem Globetrotters), but the serpent turns out to just be a giant inflatable object. In the third season episode “A Highland Fling with a Monstrous Thing” from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1978), Nessie is a disguised submarine. It might be expected that I trash this early-2000’s kids movie, but when I first saw it on TV when it came out, I really enjoyed it, and, shockingly enough? It still holds up as one of best Nessie movies ever made!

Daphne’s cousin Shannon is running the first ever Highland Games at Loch Ness, and the gang try to get to the bottom of the loch's long unsolved secret before the games begin. There are many fun characters along the way, including a kooky cryptozoologist with a Loch Ness Monster van, a strange female scientist who believes in the monster, and a skeptical museum curator. Nessie looks great, with the elongated neck and head of an Elasmosaurus and demonic glowing eyes. The monster was rendered in 3D animation, while the rest of the characters are in traditional 2D. What I always enjoyed about the unraveling of the mystery at the end was how they find out there are two fake monsters. One is a mechanical head and canvas thrown over the Loch Ness Monster van and the other is a high-tech submarine with animatronic head/arms/legs/tail—and, as a nice little touch at the very end, Scooby spots the real Nessie in the loch, which lets us have our cake and eat it too. The music is upbeat, and it brings back classic Scooby-Doo elements without overdoing it. It captures some Scottish culture and tropes fairly well (for a cartoon), and while it’s fast-paced and fun, there are still some dodgy accents, and aside from the different setting it’s a pretty typical Scooby-Doo story. All that said, I was pleasantly surprised to find this one was still enjoyable twenty years later, and still ranks as one of the best Loch Ness Monster movies. Who would have thought?

So far there have been some ups and downs just like the rolling humps of Nessie’s back, but I’m only halfway through! In Part Two, I’ll be covering a found footage film, some more low budget schlock, and concluding by going back to the 90’s for one last look at the legend on the big screen.