Beyond Loch Ness (2008)

Why so much hype?

The Worst Film Ever

Simply Perfect

best movie i've ever seen.

Beyond Loch Ness could have been such a great B movie, I mean like cult classic good, if only it didn't take itself so seriously! The acting was terrible, the CGI was laughable and the script was so wrong - all the key ingredients for a brill B movie, but alas - it was trying to be some rehash of Jaws or Jurassic Park when it should have been aiming for Lake Placid. Not a single joke in the whole film, and the only laughs it arises are the unintentional ones. And another thing, why is it called Beyond Loch Ness when its set in America? Loch Ness had some a small amount of screen time that it didn't really make much sense naming the film after Nessie!I could give it a proper review but I've already wasted 1.30hours watching the damn thing! Craig

This film is not good. I've seen worse. Fair is fair. But I certainly have seen better. The acting is quite wooden (although not utterly so) and the premises for the plot are, at best, very silly.Nevertheless, the characters act reasonably intelligently in several scenes, which is a first for movies of this kind and there are several shots of beautiful natural scenery.As for the special effects and the CGI... No. Bloody awful. I don't expect anything along the lines of Jurassic Park but surely they could have done just a little better?There are some scene inconsistencies that lowers the effect too.Still, I give it a 3 for fairly bearable characters, nice scenery and the occasional spasm of decent acting.If you don't have to pay for it, have lots of popcorn and soda and nothing better to do, I guess it might actually be enjoyable as a pass-time.

You really have to suspend reality to enjoy this one, but if you can do that it's not bad. The problem is, supposedly our ol' plesiosaur pal Nessie has gotten tired of Europe's socialism and snobbishness, and left her Scottish home of 1,000 years for...hold onto your hats...the Great Lakes! Why she would do that is beyond me. Not that America doesn't provide her with opportunities (then again maybe she's set up shop on the Canadian side), but it just seems like an extreme step to go swimming from the interior lake of one continent to the extreme interior lakes of another on the opposite hemisphere. Besides, I'm sure Nessie would find New England's rocky shores much more to her liking than Michigan, so why not stop in Boston instead and save yourself some additional wear and tear? Further adding to the improbability, she's nesting and four or five baby plesiosaurs join the fun of terrorizing small-town Americans. They're all cute and blubbery, and seem to have a blast. They actually have rudimentary feet too instead of the usual plesiosaur fins, which gives them an inherent advantage because they're much more mobile on land. Once you get past the overwhelming adversity of how Nessie got here, the movie is formulaic SciFi Original. People in a small town are up against more they can handle, have to kill the monsters before they run out of supplies, and several get decapitated. The CGI is, as usual kind of weak; the monster and her babies actually look pretty cool, but the blood-splatter scenes were ridiculous. A good move by SciFi Channel to release this in early 2008, a couple of months before they premier the similarly titled "Beneath Loch Ness." And hey, a good trend by SciFI to move away from the stupid disaster movies and start wheeling out the dinosaur flicks -- the "Loch Ness" movies, "Warbirds," the coming premier of "Aztec Rex." While this isn't a perfect movie by any stretch, I'll give it a 4 just for that trend alone.

I watched most of this film using my DVR to fast-forward through the early parts, so I missed the explanation of how Nessie gets from Scotland to North America. The more interesting question is *why* she would make the trip. After all, she and her ancestors seem to have done fine in Loch Ness for untold centuries. (Incidentally, Loch Ness is a freshwater lake–contrary to what one person posting here says. Some "lochs" are indeed saltwater sea inlets; however, Loch Ness isn't that kind.) I've enjoyed watching science fiction monster films since the Golden Age of Radiation during the 1950s, when I must have seen every film featuring dinosaurs released from the depths of the sea by atom bomb testing or mutant giant insects and mollusks running amok. I can still enjoy many of those films, but I've not yet been able to make a habit of watching the Sci-Fi Channel's made-for-TV films. Apart from their weak scripts and dreary acting, the films are hard to watch because of their almost uniformly poor CGI. Other people have commented here that the special effects in BEYOND LOCH NESS are a cut above the Sci-Fi Channel's usual standard, and I think that's probably true. There are moments in this film when it's almost possible to believe that the dinosaurs are real. However, those moments are both few and brief. A general problem with this film is that the dinosaurs are on the screen far too long; the longer we look at them, the phonier they appear. Wouldn't it make more sense to have less dinosaur footage and to make the effects in the footage that is used better? There are scenes in this film in which Nessie waddles across dry land like a duck; I almost expected it to quack.Another problem I find with this film may be more a matter of my taste than an objective criticism of the film–namely its emphasis on gore. Is it absolutely necessary to show graphic images of people being bitten in half and chewed up? Older films are often much more frightening for the off-camera violence and carnage that they suggest. Nowadays, I suppose, it's necessary to show audiences the blood–and lots of it. It's a shame that audiences are so desensitized that they can't be frightened unless they see closeups of people being dismembered and eaten. Personally, I find graphic gore more repulsive than scary. Moreover, in BEYOND LOCH NESS, the gore often merely looks ludicrously unrealistic.I have one final question about this film that another person here has already raised: What does become of the deputy sheriff at the end of the film? Is it possible that a scene accounting for his fate was cut, leaving an awkward continuity problem? Oh, well. The same thing has happened in far better films, such as THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI (exactly what is Jack Hawkins trying to explain to the Burmese women as they leave the river in that film?).