Whether viewed as a half-spoofy Blair Witch artsy low-budget horror or as kitschy-sinister Mocumentary, Incident at Loch Ness (2004) is such a delight.
Zak Penn casting himself as a worthless appalling manipulative no-talent sociopathic control-freak producer is the most amazing bit of anti-ego egoism I've ever seen an actor pull. Werner Herzog is so convincing as himself it's hard to believe he's only acting.
Their quest to find & document the actual existence of the Loch Ness monster is funny, horrific, psychologically disgusting...
And the commentary track on the DVD is like a whole new movie with Zak still in character as a butthole & Werner still angry to have been manipulated by a murderous no-talent documentarian. They never step outside the roles created in this film even while commenting on the film.
Whether viewed as an extended joke or a serious Machievallian melodrama, it's an imaginative & startling gem.
Gems are not a dime a dozen when it comes to Nessie movies. In the no-budget monster movie The Loch Ness Horror (1981), an American investigator (Barry Buchanan) & a Scottish professor (Sandy Kenyon) search for Nessy, which turns out to be a wet rubber dinosaur without much capacity for motion.
A rival team of Nessy hunters find a big egg (which looks like a huge wrinkly prune) at the bottom of the loch.
This seems likely to upset the mommy who really ought to go on a rampage to save her baby a la Mothra. But the rampage is surprisingly abbreviated, giving us just enough of the Nessy to see how fakey she is (reminiscent of Cecil the Sea Sick Sea Serpent) but not enough to actually pay off as a laughable rubber monster movie.
During the climactic scenes when the flacid neck of the Nessie puppet bites people who scream, the viewer may be reminded of 1950s monster shlock from the lower end of the scale. If you adjust your television to get rid of the color, & watch The Loch Ness Monster in black & white, you can heighten this nostalgic effect. But there's nothing else you can do to get a good movie experience from this turd.
 Shot at a small lake near Los Angeles, there's not much of a feeling that Beneath Loch Ness; aka, The Evil Beneath Loch Ness (2001) takes place in Scotland. The film is so cheap that diving shots are done on a sound stage without any water, just people pretending to be underwater.
A producer for the Explorer Channel, punningy named Lizzy (Lysette Anthony), hires a "scientific" Nessy hunter, Case Howell (Brian Wimmer). A Nessy corpse is found, killed by an even larger monster that is apparently more to be feared. The corpse is moved to a nearby mortuary, where it attracts no local interest whatsoever.
The larger monster that kills nessies is a menace to human beings & to nessies alike. To save Nessy it will be necessary to kill the larger monster. But by then a disappointed producer must have seen the rushes & so the film comes to an abrupt end.
Director Chuck Cominsky exhibits no directorial talent whatsoever. But more bewildering is how, with his background as a special FX guy, he exhibits just as little talent in the FX department.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
|
