The Scott Jeffrey and Rhys Frake Waterfield written, produced, edited and directed horror, The Loch Ness Horror began poorly and ended poorly, a bare bones idea for a ridiculous story with wooden characters and uninteresting set pieces. At the least, it wasn't offensive to watch, just very bland.
After a submarine shadowing a gigantic sea creature is destroyed by the beast, a rescue team (told nothing of the monster) are sent in to try and retrieve the sub. However, there are a trio who are clued in as to the real task; to take over the pursuit of the giant sea monster, for what means is never established. Surprisingly, having the majority of the crew totally unaware this creature is there soon leads to all sorts of disaster when it starts to attack and eat the panicking sailors.
There were lots of stupid things about this creature feature, maybe the biggest one being that the giant monster is referred to straight faced as 'the Loch Ness monster'. Due to the indie budget, there were never any vast external shots, this led to me amusingly imagining this was all playing out on Loch Ness itself, rather than out in the deep sea. The lack of any questioning as to the revelation of what they are up against was funny, but was also a bit frustrating, as there is zero explanation for why that beast would be out at deep sea. Looking at the story, the whole idea that most the crew had been lied to was ridiculous, seemed only designed to cause conflict between the three armed crew members who knew, and the rest who were oblivious. Why on earth would you want a crew to head to a location expecting it to be a straight forward rescue mission, and instead have them come up against a gigantic killer monster unawares? It leads to immediate panic and bad decisions. Chief of these was the very annoying ship's medic, Ava (May Kelly), someone calm and collected when handing out medication for sea sickness, but who collapses into a panic attacking mess for the duration of the rest of the film as soon as she is actually needed for her medical skills! Bryce (Dan Gittens) is the film's protagonist character, he seemed to be always listlessly reading their lines off a sheet unfortunately. Best of the characters was Matthew Baunsgard as Travis, though much of the movie he was relegated to sitting in an underwater single person sub not doing much.
For the monster itself, CG is used, and it is fairly obvious it is CG, but wasn't the worst I had seen. Usually the beast appears in order to eat a character, something that was hard to identify with the dark outside scenes. At least a few characters were killed in this manner without me able to recognise which ones had actually been eaten. To add to the peril, a second creature is introduced, this one bursting out of a victim Alien style, to then become a wandering threat inside the ship. Weirdly, neither of these threats are dealt with by films end, one was at least tied up with a silly cliff hanger ending, the other one was just forgotten about entirely. There are some half decent moments, a character killed off in the engine room had a suitably bloody end, but elsewhere, a prolonged death scene led to a crew member coughing up very bright red blood, that more resembled tomato soup than anything else.
From the immediate bad acting, and the silly set-up, I had a feeling The Loch Ness Horror wouldn't turn out to be the best movie. It is somewhat entertaining, but creature features are never my most favourite in the horror genre to watch. Characters were annoying, the story was terrible, and that this never got any type of resolution was the icing on the cake. I guess points for having a story about The Loch Ness Monster be set on the high seas.
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