The Loch Ness Horror (1981) - Nessie the killer handpuppet!

[Kooshmeister]

It's been a while since I've posted anything here, but I guess better late than never, let's see what y'all think of this bizarre little 80's monster flick.

The Loch Ness Horror
Rated: PG
2 slimes
Copyright Company and Date: Clan Buchanan, 1981
Submitted by Kooshmeister

The Characters

• Spencer Dean: American sonar expert with no personality.
• Professor George Sanderson: Scottish scientist who wants to prove Nessie exists. What else do you expect a scientist to do in a Nessie film?
• Jack Stuart: Crazy Scottish loon who rolls his R's way too much.
• Kathleen Stuart: Jack's prim and proper granddaughter. Somehow winds up following Spencer around everywhere. Easily the film's most intelligent character.
• Professor Pratt: Evil Scottish scientist who steals Nessie's egg. Munched.
• Colonel Laughton: British army officer who is....not here to deal with Nessie, surprisingly enough.
• Brad and Fran: A couple of necking American college students. Brad is eaten; Fran survives but goes totally bonkers.
• The Mad Scotsman: Exactly what his name implies. Attacks the aforementioned necking students and has his skull cleaved by Brad.
• Nessie: The famed Loch Ness Monster. A goofy-looking prop head on a stick. Blown up.

Ever see a trailer for an old B-movie as a kid? One that looks really interesting and proves nearly impossible to locate? I owned a variety of those cheap videotape compilations of old movie trailers and The Loch Ness Horror was one of them. It immediately grabbed my attention with this ominous narration:

"Loch Ness. Deep. Dark. Cold. Frightening. Not to those living on its shores, but to those outsiders who threaten its world-famous secret, the Loch Ness Monster, this is a warning! There is something in these waters, and it is alive! The Loch Ness Horror!"

Thereafter we are treated to a variety of scenes of Nessie attacking various people, including some armed British soldiers, an old man with a gun, and some teenagers in a rowboat out on the Loch. As a kid, I thought, "Boy this looks neat! Sure the monster looks cheesy but so what?" Unfortunately the movie proved almost impossible to locate, and it was only through the miracle of YouTube that I was finally able to see it, having been unable to even find a Torrent of it for download.

So here's my take on The Loch Ness Horror. Of course in the intervening years, I had found out how this movie was made by one Larry Buchanan and was supposedly quite cheap, especially for a movie made in the 80's, and how Nessie was just a head on a stick (!), and how the whole thing was filmed at Lake Tahoe whose surrounding countryside looks nothing like Scotland at all. None of this deterred me. Unfortunately I wasn't prepared for the level of sheer awful screenwriting I would be confronted with.

1940. A German bomber sputters and proceeds to crashland in the titular Loch Ness. Or so we're led to assume. We never actually see it land. Scotsman Jack Stuart hears the unseen impact and goes to his telescope and sees....the Loch Ness Monster! Da-dum!

Flashforward to what was then modern-times, aka the 80's. "Year of the Scot," according to the subtitle. Two guys in a little motorboat are out on the Loch, Red and Shorty. They're looking for Nessie. Hey! There she is, obligingly poking her head out of the water nearby before submerging. Hundreds of years of fruitless searching by holy men and scientists and these two asshats in a dinghy just luck out. Putting on scuba gear they dive down into the....surprisingly pristine waters of the Loch. It's also not very deep, despite dialogue to the contrary.

They discover, shock of shocks, the sunken German bomber with the dead pilots inside, and, despite having sank in 1940, the pilots' corpses aren't the least bit decayed. Nor is the plane itself in any visibly bad shape. Initially I called bulls**t on this one, but later dialogue informs us the Loch's cold waters mean no bacteria, meaning dead bodies don't decay. Red finds a big egg and then Nessie appears and eats Shorty.

Red escapes to the surface and returns to shore in the boat to inform his boss, Professor Pratt, of his find. Pratt is a longtime Nessie-hunter who figures this egg is all he needs to prove his crackpot theories. Red tells Pratt about Shorty getting eaten, but neither seems to care much. In the first of the movie's utterly ludicrous plot developments, Pratt refuses to just take the egg and drive off in their Volkswagen van because...the embryo won't survive the bouncy offroad driving. Or so he claims. So he and Red will just camp out on the shore there and guard the egg.

Meanwhile we meet what passes for our heroes. Professor George Sanderson, a Scottish scientist and also a longtime Nessie-hunter. Unlike Pratt, he's a good guy because....uh, well at the moment the only difference between Sanderson and Pratt is Sanderson isn't armed with a revolver. He meets one Spencer Dean from Texas at the docks. Spencer you see is an electronics expert who is bringing Sanderson advanced sonar equipment to search for Nessie.

Sanderson brings Spencer to meet with Jack Stuart, a local wealthy Loch dweller who lives in a mansion in the woods and hates everybody and is regarded as something as a nutcase, despite supposedly having taken the very first photograph of Nessie. More on this in a minute. En route, Sanderson also informs him of another crazy Scotsman who lives in an old rundown castle on an island and who thinks World War II is still going on. He's named...uh, the Mad Scotsman.

At the mansion, Stuart complains about modern science and we meet his granddaughter, Kathleen, a prim and proper Scottish lass who was raised by her grandfather after her mother died and as such is instilled with very old-world style sensibilities (she never wears dresses, as she believes, "A woman should never show that much thigh except to her bethrothed."). Stuart also shows Spencer the "trophy" room whose centerpiece is the photo he took, and it proves to be the famous "Surgeon's Photograph," now thought to be a hoax perpetuated by a London doctor named Robert Kenneth Wilson, not some loony Scottish nobleman named Jack Stuart. Also it was taken prior to/during World War II, whereas everything her implies Stuart took it after the war.

Why are they visiting Stuart? Two reasons. One, so Staurt can tell them where to start their search, which is flimsy as hell, and two, so Spencer and Kathleen can meet and make goo-goo eyes at one another. Spencer and Professor Sanderson take Spencer's boat and sonar equipment and find that damn sunken German plane, which is right near some underwater caves which they're certain is Nessie's lair, even though there's no actual sign or evidence of Nessie. To them, Nessie's existence is a forgone conclusion, but they're basically coming across as, "Look! Caves! This means Nessie's real!"

With sonar photos of the plane, Sanderson has Spencer take him back to shore so he can forward them to "the war office," since this is a big discovery of non-Nessie variety. Somehow Spencer convinces Kathleen to come with him out on the boat and generally makes an ass of himself and she just acts annoying and I wish Nessie would eat them both.

Meanwhile Nessie comes ashore, ostensibly for her egg, and catches Red asleep on the job, literally. She drags him into the water in his sleeping bag (he screams and flails despite clearly being capable of just slipping out and escaping) and Professor Pratt cements his villain creds by hiding in the van and ignoring Red's cries for help. After drowning Red, Nessie promptly departs, instead of, I dunno, just knocking the van over, killing Pratt, and getting her egg.

Then we find some annoying American college students who are getting a lecture from Professor Sanderson (who seems to be waiting for Spencer to remember he is onshore and come and get him, or he himself has forgotten about Spencer) about, what else, Nessie. Two of the kids, Brad and Fran, keep smooching throughout Sanderson's lecture and generally being obnoxious. Brad asks the Professor how "the Loch Ness Monster gets it on." Sanderson replies that Nessie(s) are probably asexual. Based on what, Professor?

The lecture is a hoot. Among other things Sanderson tries to dispell ideas about Nessie being an otter or manatee, which is fine, but he says the problem with Nessie being an otter is that "otters are not aquatic." The lecture concluded, Brad and Fran opt to steal a rowboat and go to the island that the Mad Scotsman lives on, so they can have sex in the old castle. Yeah. They get there unmolested, and after smooching s'more and drinking booze Brad brought along, are attacked by the Mad Scotsman with an axe because he thinks they're enemy soldiers.

Brad wrestles the axe away from him and proceeds to messily bury it in the crazy old man's head. So much for that subplot. I had thought that perhaps the Mad Scotsman was going to serve as a red herring and be blamed by the police for Nessie's killings, or perhaps even assist the good guys in fighting her off at the end of the film or something. As it stands, though, Brad just kacks 'im and that's that.

(More below)

[Kooshmeister]

Despite (or perhaps because of) killing the Mad Scotsman, Brad and Fran run and get in the rowboat to return to shore and are attacked by Nessie! Nessie eats Brad when he obligingly stands up in the boat and then falls overboard, but in true horror movie fashion, Fran gets a free pass because she's a girl, although by the time she (somehow) manages to swim to shore and be found, she's stark raving mad. Professor Sanderson tends to her, and tells the class' teacher to take her students and go to the airport and take them back to the States. Apparently he not only believes Fran's story about a monster killing Brad, but thinks the kids should just forget their friend and forget about him (!).

Meanwhile, Stuart is getting increasingly worried about Kathleen who he claims has never been out after dark. Kathleen HAS been trying to get Spencer to take her back to shore, but when he finally does, dialogue seems to indicate she's coming right back. He lets her off at a dock and waits. Considering this is (to them) just a random dock, I can only conclude she's going ashore to answer the call of nature if you get what I mean. However it isn't just ant stretch of shore. There's Professor Pratt's van! What, you mean even after Nessie killed Red, that idiot still hasn't just driven off?

Finding the van, Kathleen knocks (what? Does she think it has a bathroom in it?). Pratt opens the door. Now, he can just tell her to get lost and just save himself a lot of trouble, or he can....pull a gun on her and kidnap her for no readily apparent reason. Guess what he chooses.

Cut suddenly to the following morning. We see a blue Land Rover driving along. Its color is important because there are two uniformed (!) British army officers inside, Colonel Laughton and Sergeant Derek. Why would they be in uniform but driving an unmarked civilian vehicle? They pass the college kids on the road, whereupon Laughton tells Derek to have a roadblock set up so nobody else can leave the lake district. Gasp! The government is up to no good! Exactly what they're doing here isn't immediately apparent but it's got nothing to do with Nessie.

Professor Sanderson goes and visits Stuart and finds him asleep in his chair, having waited up all night for Kathleen. Upon being roused by Sanderson he informs his friend of his granddaughter's absence and is convinced she has eloped with Spencer (!). Sanderson tries to phone Spencer's hotel but is told by the operator that a Colonel Laughton has ordered a communications blackout. Uh-oh. He then tries the radio on Spencer's boat, but Spencer doesn't answer because he's asleep. I guess he never wondered why Kathleen never returned, or heard her rather loud scream when she saw the gun.

Meanwhile we find Kathleen tied up in the back of Professor Pratt's van. Pratt shows her the Nessie egg and says he's going to get away from the Loch, because now the egg is "strong enough" for driving. Right. He says Kathleen will be his "ticket out of here," even though he never uses her a hostage, and just seems to be kidnapping her because it's, like, evil and stuff. So he drives off, but Nessie comes ashore and stalks the van from the woods along the roadside like she's Jason or something.

Pratt doesn't make it very far before coming upon the roadblock Colonel Laughton put up, which consists of two soldiers with assault rifles. Getting out, Pratt somehow knows their guns are on safety and pulls his pistol on them. Yeah, way to avoid getting noticed, Professor. Killing two soldiers is totally going to improve your chances of slipping out of Scotland. But hey, here comes Nessie to render all of this moot! What follows defies logic. It's so utterly bad it's beautiful. For starters the guns do nothing against Nessie, but this is a given.

What makes this scene such a winner is how Nessie kills them. Up 'till now all of the attacks have happened pretty much offscreen. Here we get to see how Nessie attacks. She dips her head down and lightly bonks the first soldier and he goes flying offscreen with the stupidest look on his face and is never seen again. Then she snaps her jaws at the second soldier, and doesn't even touch him, but he falls down and dies anyway. Then the coup de grace. Nessie proceeds to clamp her mouth on Pratt's shoulder and...uh...nuzzle him a lot. He screams absolute bloody murder as Nessie just keeps nuzzling him, but really, the only significant, obvious physical damage she does is to knock off his hat. Then he falls down and dies.

Here are some screencaps of this glorious scene, just to show you what I mean:


*BONK*


*CHOMP!*


"Aaaaaaaaggggh! No, Dino, no!"

I could honestly stop the review here because the movie has already peaked. This was its setpiece, both in terms of action and in terms of sheer insane stupidity, but I guess I'll have to soldier on. So with them dead, Nessie approaches the van where Kathleen has gotten herself untied. Nessie looks in the window for a good long while, then just leaves, apparently forgetting her original reason for doing any of this: to get her egg which she must know is inside the van.

Meanwhile Colonel Laughton has Sergeant Derek drop him off at Stuart's house before sending him to enlist the aide of some explosive expert named Alex Nicholson for reasons as yet undisclosed. Then he goes inside and it turns out he is an old friend of Stuart's from the war and then Spencer arrives looking for Kathleen (he finally woke up!) and finally we learn what the army is doing here.

As it turns out that German bomber was, officially, supposed to have been shot down by one Gregory, then an anti-aircraft gunner and currently a general and knighted member of parliament. When in reality, Gregory had been with some floozy when the plane flew over his outpost. It was by pure luck it developed engine problems and crashed in the Loch. The discovery of the intact bomber will destroy Sir Gregory's reputation, so Colonel Laughton and his men are here to get rid of evidence and prevent anyone from saying they ever saw the plane.

Spencer and Sanderson object to this because blowing up the plane will mean blowing up the cave they're so certain Nessie lives in, even though, I have to stress, we're close to the end of the movie, and neither of our two main male heroes has seen the title monster.

Kathleen appears at this point driving Pratt's van, which she amazingly had the presence of mind to swipe (he's not going to need it anymore). Somehow none of the men inside hear the approaching vehicle, and Kathleen slips in through the back, sneaks upstairs, changes clothes, then comes back down to make it seem as though she were in fact upstairs asleep all night.

Kathleen doesn't tell anyone, not even her grandfather, that the reason she was out so late was because she was kidnapped at gunpoint and that she saw three people get killed by a giant dinosaur. Likewise Laughton never does find out what happened to his guys at the roadblock. At least now that we see.

Well, I take it back, Kathleen does tell one person, and that's Spencer, and she only tells him after sneaking off with him and showing him the egg in the van, which they agree should be returned to the Loch. Why didn't she do this already? Did she need Spencer's approval? Who cares what the American scientist thinks? Oh and Spencer also doesn't think it might be prudent to inform the Colonel of any of this either. Actual evidence of Nessie's existence like the egg and dead guys on the road might make him not blow the plane up, at least not now.

Anyway gonna rush to tie this abysmal little film up as quickly as possible.

Out on the Loch, Sergeant Derek and the explosives guy, Nicholson, putter out in a motorboat (real big military operation you got goin' here, Colonel; I know it's supposed to be somewhat covert but still) and Nicholson dives down to the sunken bomber and plants a bomb in the fuselage. Then Nessie appears and attacks him! He hides in the sunken plane which proves to be a bad idea since the explosive was timed (what? They didn't have long-distance detonators in 1981?). The plane blows up, taking Nicholson and Nessie with it.

Spencer and Kathleen had been racing to the scene in Spencer's boat and witness the explosion, and Kathleen sneeringly tells Spencer that now he and Sanderson have the "Nessie tissue samples" they need for their work, and now Sir Gregory's reputation is intact. "Everyone gets what they wanted." Well, except her grandfather who didn't want Nessie blown to smithereens, thanks.

Then Spencer drops the egg in the water and it sinks and we hear a heartbeat coming from it, implying the Nessie legend will live on. Make a Celine Dion joke and Nessie will come to your house in the middle of the night and eat you.

So that's The Loch Ness Horror. It just...peters out and dies with a whimper at the end. None of the main characters except Kathleen ever even see Nessie, and Nessie dies completely by accident because the army got the stupidest explosives expert in all of Scotland.

[WingedSerpent]

*BONK*

Who's a good boy? You are.  Yes, You are.