Another putrid snooze-fest of illogic and abysmal CGI from Sci-Fi, or SyFy, Channel called Beyond Loch Ness was shown again recently. This yawning proctology wound was originally aired in 2008 – which I missed the first time round – and festers on the painful premise that the Loch Ness Monster has somehow managed to arrive in Lake Superior in Michigan and, for whatever reason, along with her many carnivorous offspring, is taking a richly-deserved feeding frenzy holiday somewhere, one would presume, near the Upper Peninsula.
Since the film-makers have obviously never travelled to Scotland, nor even seen pictures of it – or of Loch Ness, for that matter – they assume that viewers will think that Vancouver British Columbia will pass for it. It doesn’t. I know. I’ve been there. And I’ve seen pictures. I’ve stood in the waters just below Urquhart Castle (pictured for your convenience). It is nothing like Vancouver. And neither does the region of Vancouver, nor the Strait of Georgia, at all resemble Lake Superior, except for the part where both areas have a body of water surrounded by land. Does nobody listen to Gordon Lightfoot? Utilising this rationale we could substitute the Orkney Islands for a remake of South Pacific.
Our tale begins in the apparently sepia-coloured, washed out year of 1976 as three researchers and a smarmy punk kid of about 15, named Jimmy, are investigating the Loch Ness monster. The Scottish guy from Stargate Atlantis (playing Jimmy’s father) brings up a giant egg (which is conveniently light and buoyant) and explains that it is a dinosaur egg, at which point Nessie bursts from the water and stares at the three men and Jimmy through a louring, watery fish-eye POV shot. The four of them stand on the beautiful sandy beach, surrounded by giant, old-growth fir trees exactly like there aren’t round Loch Ness, and stare back as if they are trying to figure out why the camera is filming them from a crane.
The guy from Stargate decides it’s best to give back the egg. They do, and Nessie goes away. One of the researchers smugly turns to the smarmy punk kid and says, ‘Pretty scary for something that doesn’t exist, eh, Jimmy?’ Because he delivers this line in a glib I-Told-You-So fashion, it instantly incurs the wrath of Nessie – who understands (as do we) that the man has not shown the proper humbled amazement at having seen a once-in-a-lifetime event – and she bursts from the water again and promptly bites the unrepentant man in half.
Everyone stands and stares at this horror as if they cant understand why the camera would be swooping down at a man squatting on a beach with his hands over his head saying ‘No!’ In the ensuing rampage Nessie smacks Jimmy out of the way with her tail and eats the other two men, including Jimmy’s dad, and Jimmy – who clearly must favour his mother because he looks as much like his father as Will Smith looks like Kevin Smith – runs and hides under a giant canoe (because there are always lots of giant canoes conveniently lying about on many of the sandy old-growth fir tree-lined beaches up and down Loch Ness). That’s thinking with your dipstick, Jimmy. Sorry.
Thankfully we are swept to present day Lake Superior, where everything is more or less in colour. Crazy Old Sean tells the local hot chick sheriff – who, of course, is also his daughter-in-law, Karen – that he has seen the Loch Ness Monster! Or something like it anyway. It’s definitely a member of the ‘plesiosauroidea’ family he tells her. And he’ll prove it.
Josh, the nephew of Crazy Old Sean and the son of Karen the Sherriff, is involved in a 90210-style tangle of cool-rich-guy-Brody-whose-girlfriend-Zoe-has-a-crush-on-the-uncool-average-local-guy-Josh-but-stays-with-Brody-because-she-has-low-self-esteem-but-she-finally-discovers-that-Brody-is-a-total-dick-and-her-real-love-is-Josh-after-Brody-gets-eaten-by-a-CGI-monster that is completely without merit and serves only to help cram the 20-minute story into a 91-minute feature.
Enter then cryptozoologist James Murphy as Indiana Eastwood, our little Jimmy from the opening segment all growed up, replete with fedora, unseasonable floor-length duster, a scar on his cheek (from Nessie’s tail), a chip on his shoulder, squinty cowboy eyes, and a hand-rolled cigarillo clenched in his teeth. He pronounces the word as ‘cigar-ee-o.’ And although that is the original and proper way to pronounce the word, here in the vapid backwaters of the mid-west we call them cigarillos – with the L-sound intact – but that’s okay. He probably spent time in some cool exotic country like Meh-hico or something and isn’t hip to the local dialect. And after all, he is a cryptozoologist, not a linguist. He is looking to rent a boat and have Josh take him round the lake, as he is investigating strange happenings. No reason. Just looking.
Crazy Old Sean goes out to find and photograph Nessie to prove to everyone he is not insane. He chops up what appears to be an entire cow and wheelbarrows it out to an old wooden pier, throwing into the water four softball-sized chunks of cartoon meat which float on the surface like bright red buoys. As luck would have it, his labours are quickly rewarded. Out of the vastness of Lake Superior, Nessie is summoned to the surface by the siren call of the bright red floaty bits and eats Sean and his camera – but not before Sean snaps just one single critical piece of photographic evidence. Of course he has a comically large telephoto lens on the camera, something which could capture an image almost a quarter of a mile away, and Nessie is patiently awaiting her next meal only ten feet in front of him, so that picture will come out just fine.
As the 90210 cast go out in a boat to go camping on an island and drag the film out even more, Obligatory Random Victim One is eaten whilst fishing on the banks of a sandy fir-tree lined beach, and Indiana Eastwood finally returns, from wherever he’s been the last few minutes, to have Josh chauffeur him round the lake.
Don S Davis, also from Stargate, plays Sheriff Karen’s deputy. He calls her to a beach where it is his sad duty to point out the uneaten portion of Crazy Old Sean which is found staring up from the beach in rubbery Tempera paint-smeared surprise. His camera, however, is no place to be found, so what a complete waste of time it was watching him stop and take a useless photograph which will do nothing to further drive the narrative.
At the same time, Indiana Eastwood and Josh find, with their sonar equipment, a convenient tunnel beneath the deep dark waters of Superior – a lake which oddly looks almost identical to the one in Scotland back in 1976 – and they soon locate a 40-foot object racing through the water. They give chase only to find themselves (in some especially bad editing) in the very spot from which they started. Their find leads to some stellar dialogue instigated by Josh:
‘What was that?’
‘Unknown species.’
‘Cool. What kind of species?’
‘Not sure. Unknown. You hungry?’
I would have preferred this:
‘What was that?’
‘Unknown species.’
‘Cool. What kind of species?’
‘Thanks for listening, fucknut. Didn’t I just say “unknown?” What part of “unknown” makes you think I would know? I’m a cryptozoologist, not the Amazing-fucking-Kreskin. Jesus Christ. No wonder all you do is rent boats for a living.’
That evening, a change which happens with head spinning rapidity, Josh and Indiana Eastwood share a quiet dinner together on paper plates outside Eastwood’s shitty old mobile home. Clearly being a cryptozoologist pays very little. We discover that Josh’s father is dead, paving the way for Mr Cryptozoology to become Josh’s new dad, if he can just break through the tough exterior of dedicated single mom Sheriff Karen whom he hasn’t met yet. Eastwood shares the pain of having lost his father as well, saying ‘I was twelve,’ as if this is somehow a perfectly reasonable explanation. And he was more like fifteen.
Later, as Obligatory Random Victim Two arrives home with her bag of groceries and is eaten by Nessie who was hiding behind a tree, Josh stops by the station to tell his mom all about the cool cryptozoologist he met. Sheriff Karen explains that Crazy Old Sean was eaten by a predator that somehow got in the lake. Josh remembers just then that he and his new dad chased some unknown thing when they were out on the boat smoking cigar-ee-os.
The 90210 cast continue to unnecessarily pad the film. Strangely, it is substantially darker on the land in Michigan than it is on the water, because out on the nearly day-bright lake, something is stirring. And soon The Obligatory Non-English-Speaking Hot Foreign Exchange Student gets her head eaten off because she can’t hear the giant CGI monster crashing through the thicket in English.
Sheriff Karen arrives at Eastwood’s shitty trailer just in time to be his future wife and questions him about what he and Josh chased out on the lake and tells him that Crazy Old Sean (who posted a sighting of a plesiosaur on Eastwood’s website, which is why Eastwood just happened to blow into town) is dead. Eastwood tells Sheriff Karen how sorry he is as if she had said, ‘Oh, my shoe is untied’ and says he will have to see the body to determine what killed Crazy Old Sean. Sheriff Brody Karen then asks Quint Eastwood if he can help.
The dwindling 90210 cast, soon encounter Nessie and stand and stare at her in the same type of horror one might reserve for staring at a slightly difficult math problem and then they ‘run’ away; slowly and laboriously, looking back over their shoulders a lot. The Obligatory Doomed Black Guy crawls inside of a conveniently-placed hollow log common to almost all cartoons and some horror films but almost never seen in reality and is summarily eaten for his stupidity.
The next morning, Eastwood goes out on the boat again with Josh. Thankfully they take with them, for some inexplicably ill-defined reason, a police scanner and, whilst out on the ‘speeding’ boat (which is leaving no wake in the water), they hear that an Obligatory Character Actor found a carcass on the beach. Despite almost no details, they race to the scene and arrive just in time. And before Deputy Don can walk the full ten yards from his vehicle to his sad duty of pointing out the carcass neither he nor the Obligatory Character Actor seem to notice Eastwood (flailing a large blue Coleman cooler full of ice like it was an ultra-light polystyrene prop) run up to the carcass and, in broad daylight, in full view, abscond with the head.
Once they see the creature’s head has been replaced with a six pack of Pepsi (which of course now makes it impossible to identify what the creature is because it is ‘the vital clue to solving this thing’) Deputy Don calls Sheriff Karen and tells her what Eastwood has done. With thoroughly impossible timing, Sheriff Karen and Deputy Don arrive at the docks, their weapons drawn, to arrest Eastwood and charge him with obstruction, impeding a police investigation, trespassing, tampering with evidence and making her fall in love with him by having a shitty old trailer and being dressed like a cowboy for no clearly-stated reason.
Eastwood explains that he’s the only one who can hunt this creature down and kill it because he has been after it his entire life. Apparently there are underwater tunnels connecting Loch Ness to the Great Lakes and this is how Nessie got to Lake Superior. (Sorry. My eyes were watering from rolling back in their sockets so far. Did that last sentence make sense?)
Without telling anyone, Josh takes his boat (and a loaded .38) out to rescue the cast of 90210 because they are probably camping in Nessie’s nest.
At the sheriff’s office, Sheriff Karen tells Eastwood that the results of ‘Wildlife’s’ study of Crazy Old Sean’s bite marks (a document which has arrived with a swiftness unseen by typical official paperwork) show ‘no match with any known genetic sequence.’ She doesn’t explain how the bite marks can have a genetic sequence, but ‘Wildlife’ is damn sure they don’t match. She asks if Eastwood has seen anything like this before. Of course he has. He’s a cryptozoologist.
So they decide to track the beast with sonar and an audio recording of Nessie which Eastwood’s father recorded in ‘76 on the shores of Loch Ness. They will try to kill the creature with a ‘military grade high intensity sonar gun,’ a ‘338 Magnum Huntin Rifle’ which fires cyanide tipped rounds – because cyanide is the only poison that will kill a plesiosaur (take that, Discovery Channel!) – and, if those two fail, then Eastwood also has a ‘custom made Soviet EMP gun.’
Josh arrives on the island to rescue Zoe and the rest of the mostly dead 90210 cast and stumbles upon a nest of muppet-baby Nessies who are devouring the wobbly remains of a surprised looking rubber doll smeared with bright red hot sauce who is supposed to be the Obligatory Doomed Black Guy. They soon turn on Josh but Zoe arrives just in time to throws rocks at the plesiosaurs so he can escape. It seems he has forgotten he has – or how to use – a gun. Zoe and Josh climb a fir tree to safety where cool guy Brody awaits them, whimpering. He believes the babies will sit and wait for them to come down from the tree. Not so, Josh corrects him, waving his hand in the air as if testing the heat of an imaginary flame; clearly their vision is based on movement (I am not making this up) and if they sit still the babies will not see them and go away.
As if by magic, this actually happens.
Cool guy Brody pleads for Josh to get them off the island in his boat. Josh says that’s going to be difficult because ‘one of those things pushed it off shore.’ Actually Josh himself pushed it off shore in his failed attempt to escape the ravenous muppet baby plesiosaurs just before Zoe started throwing rocks, but Brody doesn’t need to know the details. Why they cannot or didn’t think earlier to take the boat used by the 90210 cast is unclear. In the meantime, as Josh formulates their rescue plan, he leads Zoe and Brody to an ‘old abandoned mine’ on the island. Of course there’s an abandoned mine on the island. A magnetite mine.
Back on the docks, the Killing Party is racing into action with the speed of some people going out to do a little fishing and maybe have a sandwich. Sheriff Karen, utilising all of her forensic skills, looks in the window of the darkened boat rental shack (where Josh works) and returns to the water’s edge to report ‘I can’t find Josh. The shop’s closed.’ Eastwood says he forgot to tell her the reason Josh isn’t there is because he went looking for the cast of 90210. It is now a race against time to save Josh, and whoever is left, and to kill Nessie and her young. Hooper, Quint and Brody they race out on the Orca boat to hunt for the shark Nessie and they shoot at it her with their Buck Rogers Space Toy Soviet-Made EMP gun to no effect.
Josh swims out to the boat he pushed out into the lake and finds it is useless because someone pulled all the wires to the engine – which is inside of a housing. How a baby plesiosaur managed to disable the engine is unclear. In desperation, Josh sends up a flare which, thankfully, is seen by the crew of the Orca boat and they race to help him through the last 30 minutes of the film.
They find Josh sitting and waiting for them. In anticipation of his rescue, he leaps for their boat and attempts to grab the handrail with his forehead, a clumsy move which leaves him floating face down in the water with Nessie fast approaching. Not wanting to remove his cowboy hat and duster, Eastwood lets Sheriff Karen dive in after her son. But he does use his way cool sonar gun to thwart Nessie’s attack so that they can drag Josh’s limp body into the boat so the Sheriff administer CPR.
Once on the island, the Killing Party discover that the magnetite from the mines is disrupting the vision of the plesiosaurs. This means that they cannot see Zoe sitting motionless in the middle of the mining compound waiting for help because someone told her the plesiosaur’s vision was based on movement. Brody somehow failed to comprehend the precise definition of the whole ‘based on movement’ thing and was eaten. But the magnetite is also disrupting the fine instrumentation Inspector Gadget has brought along – like his binoculars and the telescopic lens on his rifle which we can see through quite clearly because it’s glass but which appears much like this…
…from his end of the scope.
The magnetite is abundantly scattered everywhere in a convenient powder form, and Eastwood states that it is as combustible as gunpowder (and you can read all about how it isn’t at geology.com in case I just missed something). To prove his point he scoops up some with his knife (made of an apparently a non-magnetic alloy as the magnetite slides about like common sand) and sets it on fire with his ever-present cigar-ee-o. And then the fun begins. Deputy Don and Eastwood move about twenty feet away and radio in to Sheriff Karen to inform her of their position and begin to broadcast the audio recording of Nessie to draw the young plesiosaurs away from Josh’s soon-to-be-girlfriend.
It works, as master plans go, and even Nessie is drawn by the siren call of herself on tape. Zoe makes a walk for it but Nessie comes waddling back after her. Presumably the magnetite only works occasionally to disrupt the plesiosaur’s vision. And then, out of nowhere, Eastwood appears, holding one of Nessie’s eggs and threatening to smash it if Nessie won’t let Zoe escape. How or when he theorised the eggs must be lying about somewhere – or why Nessie would choose to nest in an old abandoned magnetite mine – or how Eastwood got down from the ridge so miraculously fast is never made clear.
Deputy Don starts picking off the four babies being summoned to the recording of Nessie, shooting one in the head, another one in the head, blasting the face off of another, blasting the face off of another only from the other direction by flipping the film the other way to make it look like a different animal, and then shooting another one in the head. Behind him, one of the babies approaches as he quite suddenly runs out of ammunition. He reloads the weapon with the skill and expertise of a trained accountant who has never seen or loaded a weapon before and knows nothing about the funny stick-like brass thingies with the cyanide tips that go boom. He is eaten, saving himself the embarrassment of the final six minutes of the film.
In the confused and monumental cluster-fuck that is the finale, Eastwood uses his cool ray gun to burn a hole in the side of Nessie to more easily plunge in an entire syringe of cyanide as she tries to eat Josh. Josh, meanwhile, cowering inside a giant bin of magnetite, begins shovelling the ‘highly combustible’ powder into her mouth. He then leaps to safety just as Eastwood lights his Zippo and tosses it into the bin and Nessie bursts into a ball of cartoon fire and then blows up real good.
And now Nessie’s dead, Mr Cryptozoologist wants to find a nice little town in which to park his shitty trailer – a little town with a hot Sheriff and a 20 year old son still living at home. They all smile and walk back towards their boat into the cold grey mists of a dismal Vancouver Michigan afternoon.
And I thought Titanic made me cry…
For as long as I can remember, part of the thrill of experiencing a film in the theatre has always been the trailers. And an indelible part of that experience was the seemingly ubiquitous nature of the deep unearthly baritone voice narrating those trailers-- that announcer guy from the movies --who stamped them in your memory.



