The Loch Ness Horror

The movie doesn't take place in or around Loch Ness. It takes place in the North Atlantic somewhere. There is a distinct lack of terror or anything at all happening for much of the movie. The monster shows up now and then to eat someone. The acting is really quite bad even for a low budget horror movie. Almost the entire movie takes place on what I think is a cargo ship of some sort. It looks like a very old ship that was turned into a museum. They make sure you never see the side of the ship so it's probably at dock somewhere. There's also a very cheap submarine set. Asylum-grade monster movies love a cheap submarine set. I guess the CGI for the monster isn't terrible for the little screen time it gets. The movie also come with a small side of Alien for some reason.

This is just not very good. I have seen worse but this is just very mediocre and kind of boring for most of it.

I had the misfortune of accidentally finding this when searching for "The Loch Ness Horror" directed in 1982 by the late Larry Buchanan. I gave the 2023 film a watch for free on YouTube videos, and discovered it was no better. In fact, somehow, it was worse.

The story revolves around a rescue team being sent by a British company to locate a missing submarine in the Atlantic Ocean as opposed to Loch Ness itself, only to discover the Loch Ness monster is responsible and part of the crew is made up of thugs who take the others hostage in a soupy sub-plot.

Everything in this movie is bad. The story is sloppy and boring with a few rip-offs thrown in for good measure, like the underwater cage scene from "Jaws" and a chesbursting creature from "Alien". It might have been a little better without the hostage situation sub-plot and just focusing on the monster.

All of the characters are boring, unsympathetic, or just inept at their jobs. Most of them serve as little more than dinner for Nessie. One woman spent half her screen-time freaking out and hyperventilating. Another one tried to use paper towels to treat a man burnt by Nessies acidic saliva. And there was an annoying ship alarm blaring through half the movie! Dear God, I heard it in my sleep after watching this.

The Loch Ness monster hardly even appears onscreen. And even when it does, it's size inexplicably changes between shots and the CGI effects for it as a crummy and low-quality as you'd expect from any budget monster movie. The little skin parasites were just as poorly designed and animated.

The sets were an inconsistent mess of multiple ship interiors that obviously don't match up, including museum ships any tourist would recognize. It would have worked better to take a smaller boat out onto the actual Loch Ness, or at least a stand-in lake.

In the end, this was just another lame, God-awful budget monster movie with no redeeming qualities at all. At least the 1982 movie had a cheesy, "so bad, it's good" kind of charm to it, this was just so bad, it's boring and nigh-unwatchable. So don't waste your time on this trash.

I don't think I can stress enough how bad this film is, the acting is bad, the script is bad, the direction is bad, the sets are bad, the effects are bad, the plot is bad. So much of this film just doesn't make sense.

I watched this on Prime video, the picture showed 4 star reviews from a site called 'Creature Feature', not only can I not find this online the quote suggests "Shades of THE MEG, ALIEN and GODZILLA"... WHERE???

The Meg because it's set at sea, maybe, alien because after the monster spits something on one of the characters some kind of bug explodes from his chest and Godzilla because, why not.

At one point one of the actors tries to act with just his facial expressions, he does not succeed. I couldn't work out if he was confused, befuddled, contemplative or just trying to hold in a massive fart.

DO. NOT. WATCH.

What to say, this one is really bad.

The pacing is very slow and not by artistic design to build tension. The monster is pretty good. The logic of those on board is pathetic.

I think they bumped off the characters quickly to lighten the budget.

The monster is supposedly the Loch Ness monster. Loch being Scott's for lake, yet the story does not happen in the lake.

It is odd that the dialogue is not recorded well, so many conversations are hard to get the meaning.

Note to self, just because the advertising graphic looks slick and intriguing does not mean the movie is any good.

Plenty of other suspenseful movies go rewatch a good one, way better use if time that watching this one.

After a disastrous accident at sea, a company sends a rescue team to look into what happened and they arrive on the spot to begin their search only to find the truth when a massive sea serpent appears to attack the ship, forcing them to put a stop to the creatures' rampage to leave alive.

Overall, this is a pretty enjoyable if somewhat flawed genre effort. Most of the film's positives are centered around the admittedly enjoyable and cheesy creature attacks that come about through here. The mixture of underwater and top-side attacks that feature the creature attacking their equipment and machinery in these various locales is quite fun with the better-than-expected if still quite obvious CGI creation interacting with submarines, dive cages, or the crew while standing around on the deck of the ship has some cheesy qualities involved for a fun time. Even the revelation about the secondary type of creature that spawns in the bowels of the shop following an attack is quite fun with the series of cheesy chases and encounters that come about which give this some decent gore effects as well. Overall, these are enough to be likable and worthwhile here although there are some issues to be had here. The main drawback to this one is that, for a film as short as this one, it wastes far too much time on the mind-numbing interactions with the crew that aren't interesting or appropriate for this kind of project. The way it spends time trying to engage in small talk about their relationships or engaging in duplicitous espionage covering up the truth about what they're hunting all just isn't that interesting in how mundane or cliched these respective facets of the story are. It takes up a pretty healthy chunk of the first half trying to determine that the crew has been duped about their purpose so these scenes just come off as dull, especially with the unprofessionalism of their approach to the job which is carried out with the kind of lackadaisical energy that comes from not knowing the profession well enough with the way they approach crises that should be quite obvious here. This extends into the other drawback here in the wholly cheap presentation that comes about. As mentioned, the creature's presentation and general activity are usually better-than-expected computer effects that let the spectacle on offer give away its presentation so most of these scenes are quite goofy and silly. The ship scenes have the opposite problem where the presentation is simply using the wrong types of characters that have no formal training or purpose for being here so this can close off any hope of this one working by completely sucking any sense of realism out of the scenario. Also, for being so short the overlong finale that drags everything out endlessly with no real action or confrontations with either creature is a massively disappointing effort with very little about it that's enjoyable, and altogether these factors come together into a somewhat disappointing effort.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.