It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Ghosts are walking, portals are opening. Everyone’s free to be scary. How better to celebrate the season than a good, bad monster movie? After all, it’s the Loch Ness Monster. She just needs a little creative license and a decent effects budget.
The Loch Ness Horror is surprisingly not awful. I don’t recognize anyone in the cast, but they do their jobs competently. There’s a little gore but not too much, and the screaming keeps down to a reasonable level. The plot even makes sense, more or less, and there’s quite a nice twist toward the end.
It opens with a research sub hunting something at sea. The man and woman on board seem kind of paramilitary, with space-station-like uniforms and lots and lots of buttons and gadgets. We learn that what they’re hunting is female; she’s escaped her loch and is headed out to sea. They’re trying to find her and take her back.
She finds them first. She’s a gigantic aquatic reptile with a blobby body, shortish flippers, a long neck, and a truly incredible number of very, very sharp teeth. Those teeth close on the sub, with screaming and cries for help.
Fade to a boardroom full of actors who look remarkably like a gang of villains from a Superman movie. The research sub is missing. The woman in charge wants it found.
New scene. New set of actors. These look a little less villainous and a little more hero-like. They’re boarding a very techie-looking yacht whose captain and his henchman and henchwoman could be understudies for Zod and his minions.
Stalwart Bryce and tough, smart Lara are here to head the rescue mission, along with diver Willow, nebulously qualified redhead Ava, and Drake, who gets seasick. All too soon they learn it’s not a rescue mission, it’s a hunt. The sub and its crew are gone. They’re taking over its mission: to find the monster and bring her back, presumably to Loch Ness.
Nessie has other plans. While the humans bicker and squabble and wave guns at each other, she closes in on the boat. Willow goes down in a cage to look for the wreckage and, not incidentally, the monster. Henchman Travis follows in what he calls the pod—a small sub.
The rescue team and the boat’s crew are not getting along. But they have worse problems than guns and arguments. Nessie is a good deal bigger than the boat, and she’s hungry. She starts picking people off, starting with Willow in the cage and Drake on the boat. Then the weather goes bad. And the boat’s power goes out.
Let me pause here to salute the ship’s engineer, the Amazonian Natalya. She’s tough, smart, gorgeous, and dressed in a skimpy top. On the open ocean. At night. In a thunderstorm. While everyone else is dressed for heavy weather. Or, in Willow’s case, a deep-sea dive.
The gender balance is strikingly unusual for an adventure movie. Instead of the standard Hollywood ratio of three men to one woman, the boat features four of each. The diver’s a woman, the ship’s engineer ditto. Ava seems to be some kind of marine biologist, though she doesn’t get much chance to show it. Lara is in charge, more or less, and she and Bryce are a thing.
Bryce is mostly there to run around with a gun and be Manly. In a way I suppose he’s the guy version of Natalya in her skimpy top. This film aims to appeal to a range of genders and orientations.
So far it’s chugging along fairly predictably. Humans hunt monster. Monster hunts and starts eating humans.
Evil captain gets clobbered by Nessie, but this time she’s not looking for dinner. The rescue team get him below, where he proceeds to be drastically and lengthily sick, spewing mouthfuls of nasty-looking foam. Ava nurses him, not particularly competently, while Travis and Lara exchange frantic communications—Lara from the boat, Travis from the pod—and Bryce tries to help Natalya get the boat’s power up again.
Nessie eats Natalya. And the captain gets progressively worse, with more foam and escalating convulsions. Ava flutters and dithers and doesn’t do much.
Now comes the twist. I let out a yell when it happened, and scared the cat. OH BOY IT’S AN ALIEN IT LOOKS LIKE A NASTY LITTLE SPIDER IT POPS OUT OF HIS BODY WHOA.
Yes! It’s an Alien! And now we have big giant monster circling the boat, Travis in the pod with—lesser twist!—a load of torpedoes, and a tiny skittery monster hunting Bryce and Ava and Lara through the bowels of the boat.
The tiny spidery thing doesn’t stay tiny. It’s growing. At the rate it’s doing that, Ava says, while she’s covered with evil captain’s blood and starting to giggle wildly, give it a day and it will be as big as a human.
Right, so. Nessie is a she, and apparently she’s an Alien, though she looks like a giant plesiosaur. This is how she reproduces. She spits goo all over a host, the goo burrows in and eats the host from the inside out, and out pops tiny spidery baby Nessie. Presumably when baby finishes growing, it morphs into a giant plesiosaur with many, many teeth and a hate on for humans who hunt it.
Baby Nessie gets Ava, who holed up in a space with only one exit. Not smart, Ava.
That leaves Lara and Bryce on the boat and Travis in the pod. But Travis is running out of air. He has his torpedoes, and he’s ready to make the sacrifice. He’ll blow up mama. The other two will have to take care of baby.
The pod blows. Lara and Bryce have a sad moment, and apparent amnesia about baby Nessie. But they’re alive, and they’ll get the boat running and head back to shore. Victory!
Not so fast, says Nessie, rising up out of the sea. And that’s a wrap.
I have questions. Will VillainCorp try again? Will they nuke Nessie from orbit? Or will she vanish into the depths of the ocean? Will the boat float away with its deadly parasitic cargo, waiting for some unsuspecting rescuer? Or will mama retrieve her baby and leave the boat empty except for a couple of baffling bodies?
It’s a big ocean. It could be years, if ever, before she’s found again—if she even wants to be.
Unless she’s hungry. Or it’s breeding season. Or she decides to continue her vendetta against the humans who tried to hunt her down.
