Loch Ness Terror

You’ve got to admire a movie that titles itself Loch Ness Terror and mostly takes place in Lake Superior (the original title was Beyond Loch Ness, and that would be more accurate, since Lake Superior is certainly beyond Scotland). I guess it doesn’t matter, since the lake near Vancouver which serves as bock Loch Ness and Lake Superior for the film doesn’t look like either one of them.

Before we start, if you want to know the truth about what lurks in Loch Ness, click here. Just don’t blame me if the disillusionment is too much to bear.

The SyFy Channel must use a customized script element generator to produce their creature features. Here you have the prologue scene where a boy watches a parent killed by a monster, inspiring him to grow up to be a monster hunter (if the monsters realized how vindictive humans are, they wouldn’t leave any uneaten rugrats behind when they attack), the remote island used as a breeding ground for the creature where a group of dimwitted teens get marooned, and the emo kid who has lost his girlfriend to the rich dirtbag who inevitably turns out to be a loser. I guess if something comes close to being arguably competent, keep doing it.

Brian Krause plays the traumatized kid who grows up to be a fearless Nessie hunter, and the only other recognizable face is the late Don S. Davis, who played General Hammond on Stargate SG-1. The plot goes something like Nessie moves from Loch Ness to Lake Superios by way of underwater tunnels (!) and shows up to eat people and breed. There doesn’t seem to be a Mr. Nessie around, but maybe there doesn’t have to be. There is the requisite, albeit it brief, hesitation of law enforcement to believe people are being eaten by a plesiosaur (“It could be an alligator,” they say, their breath smoking in the frigid air.) and then the surviving cast gets to monster killin’. There is some hokum about the creatures being blind when they are around magnets for some reason, but it all works out well in the end, largely because aquatic dinosaurs are apparently intensely flammable.

The CGI creatures are actually decent by SyFy standards (which means they look like they come from a high-end computer game, rather than a low-end one) although when they switch back and forth between CGI and puppets, the two don’t look remotely like the same creature. The baby dinosaurs actually look pretty cute in their CGI version, except when they are pulling out someone’s entrails.

By all reasonable artistic standards, this is a pretty bad movie, but by SyFy giant critter movie standards, it isn’t that bad, which I suppose is damning with faint praise, or maybe praising with faint damnation. If you are the type of person that enjoys this type of movie, you will probably enjoy this one. We did.
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