Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again set up a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: When Nature Attacks
Unlike features that hide their terrible digital effects behind twenty-minute sequences of people talking about the weather, Paul Ziller goes all out, unashamed, and lets his zeroes-and-ones-encoded Nessie chomps arms, legs, and heads. At one point, it even bites a dude clean in half. And if you thought Nessie was stuck in the water, news for you: she sprouts legs so she can plod around murdering camping teenagers who might be thinking about having sex.
That said, this doesn’t just have bullshit science. It has bad science, as they keep referring to Nessie as both a plesiosaur and a dinosaur. Plesiosaurs didn’t have legs and were marine reptiles, not dinosaurs. Sorry to be all Neil deGrasse Tyson.
We start at Loch Ness in 1976 with two Scotsmen and a spunky American boy. It’s clear from all the intense squinting and Atari noises in the background that these are supposed to be scientists investigating the Loch Ness Monster. “The Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist,” the kid replies Americanly, not knowing the punishment for skepticism like this is watching your family get ripped to shreds before your eyes.
He gets his wish, even if he doesn’t want it.
Fast forward thirty years to a brighter, more American future in a scenic lakeside village. Here we meet Josh (Niall Matter), a weenie who runs the local bait shop whose mom is the sexy town sheriff (Carrie Genzel). Josh is hung up on his ex-girlfriend Zoe (Amber Borycki), who rolls in dropping compliments like “nice wetsuit.” Of course, Zoe has an actual boyfriend right now—named Brody, because of course his name is Brody; this is less dinosaur movie than shark film—who understandably responds with some good-natured bludgeoning. But we’re supposed to feel bad for Josh anyway because the boyfriend is blond, attractive and probably good at sports and horizontal mambo. Anyway, Zoe, Brody, and two conventionally attractive women zip off to an island to fuck and also die, leaving Josh to sulk in his bait shop alone.
With the deep twang of a southern guitar, the ruggedest dude this side of Indiana Jones fanfiction saunters in. Cigarillo clutched in his teeth, Mr. McCool (Brian Krause, who banged out his alien mom in Sleepwalkers; he was also the Bandit’s sidekick in the TV movie series)—who is, of course, the plucky American kid from the prologue all grown up—announces that he is a hard-hittin’, sharp-shootin’ cryptozoologist. He wants Josh to be his sidekick as they patrol the lake for murderous lawn care supplies. Josh nearly shits himself with eagerness because he is “an avid reader of Science Digest,” even though cryptozoology is to real science as a chiropractor is to an actual doctor. But Josh can’t think of anything more tubular and/or rad than McCool’s crypto-cred, completely ignoring the fact that in real life, cryptozoologists tend to look a lot less like action stars and a lot more like fat incel dudes gone squatchin’ and knocking on trees.
Ziller also made Pledge Night, Bloodfist IV, Shootfighter II and a ton of basic cable movies. Is this even a nature-gone-wild movie? Well, I believe in dinosaurs, so there. That’s nature. Is this a good movie? Of course not. But I laughed like a maniac as I watched the Loch Ness Monster—which is also real and magic and all things I find sacred—walk around like my chihuahua with arthritis.
You can watch this on YouTube.
