BEFORE: All right, I'm betting this one won't be very scary, because obviously it's going to be about the Loch Ness Monster, and the poster makes it look a bit like a re-telling of "Free Willy". But I've done two movies about sea monsters already this year - "The Sea Beast" and "Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken", so that will probably be a whole category at the end of the year, sea monsters and mermaids and selkies and yeah, giant sharks. Sometimes they're monsters and sometimes they're not, it just depends on the film. I'm surprised that we still call these films "monster movies", isn't that just a bit perjorative? You'd think by now the P.C. police would have stepped in and demand that we call them "non-human creature films" or "films about differently genetically endowed life forms perceived to be monstrous by non-aware people". I mean, sure, CGI monsters have rights too, umm, don't they? Maybe not.
Ben Chaplin carries over from "Dorian Gray"
THE PLOT: A lonely boy discovers a mysterious egg that hatches a sea creature of Scottish legend.
AFTER: Yeah, this was as bad as I figured, they tried to cutify the Loch Ness Monster by showing what it would have looked like as a baby (If it existed, which it probably does not) and a young Scottish boy finds its egg on the seashore and takes it home, then he inadverently causes it to hatch, and now he's got a baby sea monster running around his family's home - what could POSSIBLY go wrong there?
This film is set during World War II, and just days after finding the egg and hatching the creature (which he names "Crusoe", not "Nessie") a group of Scottish soldiers sets up camp at his family's estate, because of the strategic location of Loch Ness nearby, and the chance that German submarines may invade Scotland from the ocean. Yeah, I just checked the map, that seems unlikely due to the position of Loch Ness on the map - why would the Nazis go all the way around England, past London, and invade the U.K. from the north, through Scotland? That seems unlikely, but even if they would (which they wouldn't), Loch Ness is quite a ways inland, wouldn't it make more sense for the army to set up their guns and their observation point at Inverness to the north or Fort William to the south? Just saying. And why target Loch Ness and bypass Edinburgh, or Glasgow, or, you know, LONDON?
I don't think that the MacMorrow family owns this big estate, it belong to Lord Killin, whoever that is, and I'm not sure what the relationship is, I guess Charles MacMorrow, Angus' father, was the handyman at the estate, and where Lord Killin is, I have no idea. But Charles went off to war a year ago, and his son Angus is counting the days on a calendar until his tour of duty is over, but then later in the film Angus' mother lets slip that Charles was lost at sea after his ship sank, and that was more than a year ago. So no, I don't think he's coming home, but I guess if they acknowledged his death then the family couldn't live on this estate any more? A new handyman comes to replace Angus' father, which would only be a problem if Angus was storing some kind of baby sea monster in that workshop...
But Lewis, the new handyman happens to know what the creature is, it's a legendary Water Horse, which the story says is genderless, and each creature lays one egg before it dies, so its child is born an orphan. And as a baby that Water Horse doesn't know how to eat or take care of itself, so it's no wonder that the species is rare and endangered, because it's quite dumb and over time that species would starve to death, right? Like by the time it figures out how to swim and eat fish, it's too late. Anyway, Angus cares for the creature and feeds it apples and puts a bandage on the cut on its back that he probably gave it when trying to crack open its egg.
Now he's got to raise this sea monster and prevent his mother from seeing it, because she's very strict about not having pets, and also he's got to keep it away from the Royal Artillery Troops, who have been hunting deer in the nearby forest and would probably love to hunt a dinosaur or Water Horse or whatever the hell Crusoe is. So Charlie and Lewis have to keep it hidden, even though it's growing at a phenomenal rate, must be all that garbage it's been eating, who knows. But the Army's mascot bulldog, Churchill, keeps destroying the kitchen and the dining room whenever it chases the sea monster, god damn it, this it a Loch Ness Monster film, not a Tom & Jerry cartoon.
Lewis and Angus take Crusoe in a truck over to Loch Ness, thus fulfilling the prophecy that they didn't even know about - and Crusoe takes to the water almost like he was made for it, which he was. Later, when Angus sneaks off to the lake - because who wants to do stupid army chores and learn some discipline, am I right - he goes for a ride on the Loch Ness Monster, and Crusoe kind of forgets that Angus needs to breathe air once in a while. But this is probably the highlight of the film, a thrill ride on the back of a sea monster while exploring the depths of Loch Ness. There are ruins down there, a sunken ship with a treasure chest, and so on.
Captain Hamilton of the Royal Artillery seems to have a thing for Angus' mom, so he tries to discredit the new handyman as some kind of non-veteran or deserter, to no avail. Then he takes the MacMorrow family to a hill overlooking Loch Ness so he can demonstrate the artillery by firing shells into the lake, because what better way to keep your outpost's location secret than by blowing a bunch of nothingness up? The shells come a bit too close to Crusoe and manage to change the docile creature's temperament, which only goes to prove that MAN is the ultimate monster, not the monster itself. Sheesh, give me a break.
Meanwhile, two fishermen who encountered Crusoe face-to-face have no luck taking a photograph of the monster, so they create a wood-frame silhouette of a sea monster's head and take the famous photo that has been all but debunked over the years. Right, because the photo was faked but that also means that the sea monster is real. Again, give me a break. That's like disproving the famous footage of Bigfoot by finding the costume somebody wore when filming it and then deducing that Bigfoot simply MUST be real, but that doesn't make any sense.
Finally the soldiers come to hunt the sea monster and prove its existence, of course by trying to kill it. (Again, man is the monster here, he kills anything he doesn't understand...). But the McMorrows and Captain Hamilton, having seen the creature up close, help it to evade the army's net and get out into the open sea. So it really IS like "Free Willy" in the end. Angus grows up and never sees the creature again, but he's got a hell of a story to tell any tourist who wants to hear it, and also a few who don't.
Again, I fondly remember the day when monsters were monsters and we didn't have to justify them or cute-ify them or explain in movies why they weren't monsters at all, they were all just horribly misunderstood. The woke-ness started a couple decades ago, it turns out, before Godzilla and Kong were defending Earth from the BAD giant monsters and the Sea Beasts were hunted to near-extinction for a totally B.S. reason. Did the Loch Ness Monster NEED a back-story where it looked like an ugly Pokemon and grew up faster than anyone thought it could? Umm, no, it probably did not, mostly because it's not real.
Also starring Alex Etel (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Brian Cox (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Emily Watson (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), David Morrissey (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Priyanka Xi, Marshall Napier (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Joel Tobeck (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Erroll Shand (last seen in "Slow West"), Craig Hall (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Geraldine Brophy (last seen in "King Kong" (2005)), William Johnson (ditto), Ian Hancourt (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Eddie Campbell (ditto), Bruce Allpress, Carl Dixon, Nathan Christopher Haase, Megan Katherine, Lorraine McDonald, Edward Newborn, Louis Owen Collins, William Russell, Ben Van Lier,
RATING: 4 out of 10 pints of McEwan's at the pub
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