We open in the Highlands of Scotland along the shores of Loch Ness. The year: 1940. Above we hear a plane engine prowling the sky, as does the kilt-clad denizen of a nearby lodge.
This man, most likely a member of some civilian observation group on the look out for enemy planes, takes up his post and mans his telescope to get a closer look; and he sees that it is, indeed, a German plane.
But before he can raise an alarm, the plane suddenly develops some fatal engine trouble and crashes into the water, off screen, just as the legendary monster of Loch Ness surfaces to … see what happened, too? Maybe?
Now, if you have any hopes that you’ve just tuned into a Nessie vs. Nazis kerfuffle, well, forget about it as the monster essentially shrugs, burps, and sinks, and then we quickly crash-cut to some forty years later.
We’re still at Loch Ness, where we quickly zero in on two men decked out in scuba gear sitting in a comically small inflatable raft. Turns out Red (Clover) and Shorty (Cohen) are a couple of ersatz monster hunters, there to find proof of the fabled Nessie, dead or alive, for pure fortune and glory. But! Their hunt so far hasn’t turned up a thing and, with their backer’s money running out, odds are good this will be their last dive before officially giving up.
Suddenly, the monster surfaces nearby. And so, over the side they go in pursuit, where they make their way to the bottom. Here, they stumble not upon the creature but that very same German plane. Further exploration shows the fuselage is completely intact, as are the pilots, still manning the controls from beyond the grave, due to the frigid temps at the bottom of the loch, which essentially froze and preserved them without the usual putrefaction or decomposition. (The film explains the science behind it later.)
But their attention is soon drawn away from this rather macabre scene when Scotty finds something else embedded in the silt nearby; an egg the size of a football! But just as the men free it so they can abscond it to the surface, the beast that laid said egg suddenly strikes. And while the monster tears Shorty into a bloody plume offscreen, Red manages to escape with the egg.
This surviving egg thief eventually makes it to shore, where a Professor Pratt waits at their encampment. A disillusioned academic with delusions of grandeur, Pratt (Lancaster) is that financial backer I was talking about.
He pays no heed to Red’s report of his partner’s death and instead fusses over the egg, fearing his stooges might’ve damaged the embryo inside. And while Red wants to just take the egg and run, with the brass ring in hand, Pratt says they’ll have to wait, saying the egg is too stressed to move right now and they’d risk further damage.
Meanwhile, another batch of a more scrupulous variety of Nessie hunters have gathered near the docks. Here, Spencer Dean (Buchanan), an American, shows Professor George Sanderson (Kenyon), a Scottish marine biologist, all the fancy sonar equipment installed on his boat.
The Yank then takes the Scot for a spin, where he demonstrates how the sonar works, making a printed image of whatever the scan detects as they pass over it. And by luck, they get a scan of that German plane -- a plane that shouldn’t be there.
Here, a curious Sanderson asks to borrow these scans so he can pass them along to the proper authorities. As they head back to shore, they pass an island occupied with the ruins of an old castle, where Sanders says the Mad Scot of Killie-Cranky Isle lives; who, as the legend goes, can actually speak to the monster of the loch. But since he’s crazy, Sanderson and Spencer also make arrangements to meet another local expert who could tell them the best place to start their hunt for the monster.
But that will have to wait until morning. For now, we head back to Pratt’s camp, where he carefully secures the egg inside a crate and tucks it into his caravan. Over by the campfire, Red is ensconced in his sleeping back, sound asleep, unaware that the monster has waddled ashore in search of its offspring. It then seizes Red in its jaws, sort of, and then drags him back to the loch, where it presumably drowns or eats him offscreen as Pratt callously watches the whole thing from the safety of his vehicle.
Cut to the next morning, where we see Sanderson and Dean approach a familiar looking lodge. Before they knock, Sanderson warns his new American friend that the man of the house is a bit of a crank, especially when he’s been drinking, which is always. Also, he’s the legal guardian of his granddaughter, Kathleen, who has a prickly aversion to Yanks.
Once inside, we meet Jack Stuart (Livingston), the same man we saw witness the plane crash and the monster back in 1940. And according to the film’s lore, it was Stuart who took the infamous photo of the monster back in the 1930s (-- more on the true history of this photo in a sec), proudly displayed on the mantle along with the camera that took the snapshot.
Anyhoo, as Stuart gargles his Rs and gnaws his brogueish accent into most of the furniture (-- these guys aren’t just Scottish, they be Scottish pirates, maties), the men get to discussing the nature, genus, and species of the beastie, Stuart refusing to call it a monster. He soon takes a liking to the affable Dean and softens up considerably as he pinpoints where they should start looking and places to avoid.
But the same can’t be said for Kathleen (McKenzie), whose mistrust of the American will take a little more cajoling to dispel.
Thus, Dean invites her for a ride on his boat, hoping to break the ice. But this backfires as she constantly scolds him for his constant blasphemes when his equipment keeps crapping out. And it gets even worse when he tries to explain the depth charges filled with offal and blood that he intends to drop into the water so he can sort out Nessie from any sharks or seals. (E’yeah.)
Meanwhile, Sanderson is giving a lochside lecture about the loch and its most famous denizen to a group of obnoxious American college students, who are touring the highlands under the watchful eye of a Ms. Stowall (Musick). How obnoxious? The only questions they have for Sanderson is about the monster’s sex life. Are there more than one? If so, then how do they ‘get it on.’
"The coupling cannot be called in the vernacular, 'a quickie,'" says Sanderson, who thinks the amphibian might be some kind of self-populating hermaphrodite.
Also of note, the juxtaposition of conjecturing on Nessie's mating habits onshore with the clumsy courtship of our hero and heroine out on the boat is pretty darned hysterical. We can’t rate the chemistry, because there is no chemistry between these two.
Later that night, two of those sex-obsessed American tourists, Alex and Fran (Scott, Scott), steal a boat and head to Killie-Cranky Isle because neither of them have ever had sex in the ruins of a castle before, as you do.
Then, the film takes an abrupt and rather absurd left turn into Slasher film territory as these two try to go at it, not realizing they’re being stalked by the Mad Scot of Killie-Cranky Isle and his trusty battle axe. But when he attacks, Alex is able to wrestle the weapon away, which he then turns around and uses to kill the crazy old coot with several strikes to the head! (The hell, movie?!)
The two students then quickly pile back into the boat and paddle out onto the loch. Where, well, turns out there might’ve been something to that connection between the monster and the Mad Scot -- I believe the film is trying, and mostly failing, to infer some kind of psychic connection, as the monster seemingly hears and reacts to the old man’s screams as he got axed to death.
Regardless, Nessie attacks the fleeing students. It takes out the boat, and then turns on Alex, killing him offscreen, while Fran manages to swim away. (New rule of Slasher movies: Have sex, get eaten by a lake monster. Check, and check.)
Meanwhile Dean and Kathleen are pulling a "Wake Up, Little Susie" out on the loch. Only they're not at the drive-in. They're in a boat. And they're not watching a movie. They're watching sonar readings and still arguing over the fine etiquette of profanity. They haven't fallen asleep either. So, never mind. Forget I even brought this analogy up.
Moving on, the film then takes an even dumber turn when Fran stumbles back into the college campsite, babbling hysterically about how the monster ate Alex. Of course, Alex was one for practical jokes, and so, Stowall doesn’t buy it.
Thus and you gotta be kidding me, to get this aggressively asinine subplot safely tucked away and mercifully out of the picture, it’s decided the best way to deal with this obviously traumatized girl is to just send her home with a shush-shush and a tut-tut and a be on your way, lassie. (Seriously. Who wrote this crap? Oh, we’ll be getting to that, believe me.)
Elsewhere, after pulling an all-nighter with Spencer out on the boat, come the dawn, Kathleen is dropped off on shore. And as she makes her way home (-- and I have no idea where her bike went either), she stumbles onto the wreckage of Pratt’s encampment.
Curious, she peaks through the windows of his caravan. She sees the egg, but doesn’t know what to make of it. And so, wanting a closer look, she slides open the side door only to come face to face with the psychotic Pratt and the barrel of his revolver…
The first documented sighting of a cryptid in Loch Ness dates all the way back to the 6th century -- at least according to Abbot Adomnan’s biographical account of Saint Columba, Vita Columbae, written approximately around 700A.D.
As the tale goes, Columba, along with 12 others of his order, left Ireland for Scotland to convert the heathen Picts to Christianity. And as these missionaries searched for a way to traverse the loch by boat, they came across a Pict funeral, where the mourners claimed the deceased was killed by some “water beast.”
Then, “Against common sense, Columba ordered Lugne Mocumin, one of his fellow monks, to swim across the loch and bring back a small boat, known as a coble, which was moored on the opposite shore,” reported Angelo Stagnaro (St. Columba and the Loch Ness Monster, April 19, 2017). “Without hesitation, Lugne stripped off his tunic and immediately jumped into the water. The monster, alerted by Lugne's splashing around, surfaced and raced towards the hapless monk, eager for a bite.
“The monster gave a mighty roar, darting towards the swimming monk with its mouth wide open. Everyone on the shore cried out hoping to warn the monk of his impending doom. However, Columba was unmoved. Instead, the saint stepped forward boldly to the edge of the loch and, making the sign of the cross while invoking the Name of the Lord, spoke in a commanding voice, ‘You will go no further! Do not touch this man! Leave at once!’
“Even though the monster was no more than a spear's length away from the swimming monk, at the sound of the saint's words, it stopped and immediately fled the scene terrified." As Adomnan described it, the monster moved “more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes” as it retreated into the depths of Loch Ness.
Now, according to legend, Loch Ness was formed by an enchanted natural well or spring that was misused by mortals. Admonished by the Druids to keep this well covered when not in use to maintain its purity, the locals obeyed until the fateful day when a mother left it uncovered to rescue her baby from a fire. Thus, the spell was broken, the well overflowed, filling the entire vale, forming the massive lake / loch.
For those more scientifically inclined, the large body of fresh water was carved out of the Great Glen Fault through glacial erosion. Located in the Highlands of Scotland, it’s second only to Loch Lomond in size, stretching some 23 miles in length, but is only about a mile across at the widest, and maxes out at 750ft deep. It got its name from the river Ness, which connects it with the North Sea near Inverness. To the south it is fed by the river Oich, making it part of the Caledonian Canal, which connects several lochs, bisecting Scotland from Inverse to Corpach.
Native species found in its watery environs include northern pike, sturgeon, salmon, trout, several species of eel, and maybe, just maybe, an as of yet unclassified form of cryptid.
In 1871, a man named Mackenzie reportedly saw an object that he first mistook for a log or an upturned boat churning up the water before disappearing. In 1888, Alexander Macdonald of Abriachan spotted something that reminded him of a salamander, only a lot bigger, breaking the surface of the loch.
But tales of the cryptid didn’t really take root until 1933 thanks to a rash of well-documented sightings, beginning with a report in The Inverse Courier (May 2, 1933), which described a sighting by Aldie Mackay on April 15, 1933, as she and her husband drove along the loch on the A82:
"The creature disported itself, rolling and plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale, and the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron. Soon, however, it disappeared in a boiling mass of foam. Both onlookers confessed that there was something uncanny about the whole thing, for they realized that here was no ordinary denizen of the depths, because, apart from its enormous size, the beast, in taking the final plunge, sent out waves that were big enough to have been caused by a passing steamer."
And here, the beast would finally get a name: The Loch Ness Monster.
The Daily Sketch (December 7, 1933).
Then in July, 1933, Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer had what Spicer would later describe as “a strange and rather horrible experience” as he and his wife traversed the very same road; only this time, they spotted the creature out of the water as they witnessed a bizarre, undulating mass of something crossing the road ahead of them:
“Suddenly there appeared a long neck attached to an enormous body,” testified Spicer for The Western Mail (December 18, 1933). “It looked like the popular idea of a prehistoric monster, and moved across the road in a series of jerks. It was four or five feet in height, curved in shape, and grey in color like an elephant. It appeared to us that the creature was carrying something like a small dear or a sheep upon its back. (Other testimonies said the carcass was clutched in the beast’s mouth.) Its legs, if it had any, were very close to the ground.
“We were about 250 yards away and I accelerated quickly, but there was no trace of it at the spot, but we could plainly see where it had beaten down the bracken and we decided that it must have gone into the loch. I think it was about 30ft long, and could quite easily have upset the car if it had attacked us.”
Then, in January, 1934, Arthur Grant barely avoided a collision with the creature in the middle of the night while riding his motorcycle.
“When I first caught sight of it, the beast was about 50 yards away and appeared as a black object on the right-hand side of the road,” said Grant (The Northam Advertiser, February 10, 1934.) “I slowed down and turned the rays of my (head)lamp on it. I was then about 30 yards from it. Still resting on the bank, the monster first turned its head to the right, and then the left. It gave a leap into the middle of the road, appearing to propel itself by a lurch of its two rear flippers, which were very strong looking and webbed. It landed on its two front flippers, which were also strong looking, but not webbed. As I watched the animal gave another heave over the left hand bank of the road. I laid down my motorcycle and ran after it. When I reached the water’s edge I saw it disappear, leaving a large wave and wash.”
A veterinary student, Grant would give the most anatomically detailed description yet: “Length, from 18 to 20ft; height at shoulder about 4.5 feet; head like a snake or eel, flat at the top; a large oval eye, black and beady; a longish neck; two very slight humps on its back; and a long tail. The back feet were seal like, and the fore feet were in the shape of a penguin’s flippers. The body grew thicker towards its tail, and it was black or dark brown in color and had skin like a whale’s.”
The Springfield Daily Republican (December 27, 1933).
The first (alleged) photographic evidence of the monster was taken by Hugh Gray in November, 1933. But while that image is extremely blurry, to the point of being undecipherable, the next photo was crystal clear and became the iconic and indelible image of the monster the locals were now affectionately referring to as Nessie.
The photo was (allegedly) taken by Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London gynecologist on a hunting trip near the loch in early 1934, where he captured the monster surfacing from the depths. It was first published in The Daily Mail in April, 1934, and came to be known as the “Surgeon’s Photograph.” And when people think of the Loch Ness Monster, odds are good the first image to spring to mind is that long-necked silhouette sticking out of the rippling water.
However, it was later revealed that this was all just an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by an Ian Wetherall. Wetherall was the son of Marmaduke Wetherall, a noted big game hunter, who was hired by The Daily Mail to investigate the loch and find proof of its monster. The elder Wetherall would produce photos of what he claimed where the footprints (flipper prints?) of the monster. But these were quickly debunked as being made by the taxidermied hoof of a hippopotamus.
With his father's reputation in tatters, Ian Wetherall decided to put one over on the paper. It was the younger Wetherall who actually took the infamous photo, and Wilson was selected as a front man, feeling his reputation as a doctor would lend more credibility to the faked photo, who managed to sell it to the very same paper, which officially ignited Loch Ness Monster fever.
The Daily Record (October 30, 1933).
Then, in 1975, Wetherall finally came forward and came clean, claiming what was depicted in the infamous photo was actually a wind-up toy submarine doctored by sculptor Christian Spulring, who attached a facsimile of the monster to the toy, molded out of plasticine puddy, and then turned it loose in the water.
Gray’s photo has been similarly debunked. The same for Peter MacNab’s photo from 1955, which showed the humps of the creature’s back near the ruins of Urquhart Castle, which keeps a silent vigil over Loch Ness.
The first moving images of Nessie were captured by Sir Edward Mountain in 1934, the second by Malcom Irving in 1936. Both showed an unidentifiable body moving along the surface of the loch. (Both films are reportedly now lost.) And then there was that time it might’ve been caught on film, at least according to some.
On September 17, 1947, John Cobb became the Fastest Man on Earth when he broke his own land-speed record, achieving 403mph in his Rialton Special on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Determined to be the Fastest Man on Water, too, Cobb commissioned a jet-powered boat called the Crusader and chose Loch Ness to shake it down and run the speed trials.
But tragedy struck on September 29, 1952, when, as Cobb reached a speed of over 240mph, the Crusader, as it rocketed across the surface, suddenly exploded! Cobb was killed instantly. The whole event was caught on film for the newsreels; and while watching, everything seems nominal until the boat just detonates. And while the official cause of the crash was due to “undamped oscillation” which caused “a loss of control authority,” others believed that Cobb must’ve hit something -- something big and solid enough to bring a boat going 240mph to a complete halt. And the only thing possibly big enough in the loch to do that was, well, you know who.
Then in 1960, aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale caught what appears to be the head of the creature, with the shadow of the body below, cruising around the surface of the loch, leaving a noticeable disturbance in its wake. Dinsdale called it “the first scientifically valuable piece of evidence ever obtained on film of this phenomenon (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 22, 1960).”
Still from the Dinsdale footage.
Of course, Dinsdale’s film is also in dispute, as are the photos of Nessie’s flippers, captured underwater by a joint effort of the Academy of Applied Science (AAS) and the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau (LNI) in 1972. Backed up by sonar readings, the photos have come under fire for confirmation bias and being “enhanced”, meaning doctored, to bring out the necessary details.
Over the years, there have been many theories on what Nessie could be -- aside from misidentified logs or boat wakes; a mythical shapeshifting Kelpie, or a hoax to drum up attention or tourism. The main running theory is that it’s some kind of descendant of a dinosaur, most commonly implied as a Plesiosaur, who went extinct some 60 million years ago. (My personal favorite is that there is some kind of time bubble somewhere in the loch, where the prehistoric creature blips in and out of current existence.) There’s also a running theory that it could be an oversized eel.
The AAS / LNI flipper photo.
There have been several organized searches and scientific expeditions to verify the monster, peaking in the 1970s; but no definitive proof has ever been found as underwater cameras and submarines / submersibles were essentially useless due to the underwater visibility being exceptionally poor due to a high peat content in the surrounding soil.
But real or not, Nessie wasn’t alone, as several large bodies of water around the world also sported their own local monsters: Lake Champlain’s Champ (USA), Okanagan Lake’s Ogopogo (Canada), the Diablo Ballena (Devil Whale) of Lake Tota (South America), the Phaya Naga of the Mekong River (Asia), and the Mokele-Mbembe of the Congo River basin (Africa) to name but a few.
The Sydney Morning Herald (October 22, 1960).
And like its cryptid cousins the Sasquatch (alias Bigfoot) and the Yeti (alias the Abominable Snowman), Nessie would pop-up in popular media almost immediately. The first appearance was a 1934 short story The Monster of the Loch by William J. Makin. Leslie Charteris' The Saint ran into Nessie in The Convenient Monster (1959), where Simon Templar gets involved with an inheritance grab with the monster framed for murder -- later adapted as an episode of The Saint TV-series (S5.E6, 1966).
Lionel Fanthorpe's The Loch Ness Terror (Supernatural Stories, January, 1960), sees an investigator go over the history of Nessie sightings with an expert before having his own terrifying close encounter with the beast, clamped in its jaws and taken to an underwater grotto, where the creature tries to communicate with him telepathically.
Doctor Who (1975).
Jeffrey Konvitz’s Monster: A Tale of Loch Ness (1982) sees Nessie raise all kinds of hell with encroaching oil prospectors. And Steve Alten, the author of The Meg series, weaves a tale of the Loch Ness Monster, Templar Knights, and the excised heart of William Wallace in The Loch (2005).
On TV, Nessie proved to be an alien sock-puppet in one of my all-time favorite Dr. Who serials, “Terror of the Zygons” (S13.E1-4, 1975). And a Nessie surrogate appeared in a totally bonkers episode of MacMillan and Wife, “Death of a Monster, Birth of a Legend” (S3.E1, 1973).
Nessie’s first big screen appearance would come as early as 1934. A vehicle for comedian Seymour Hicks, Secret of the Loch (1934) sees a reporter, who, in an effort to win the hand of the granddaughter of a scientist (Hicks), who hates the press for ridiculing his theories on the actual existence of the Loch Ness Monster, sets out to prove him right. Here, the monster is played by a handy, dry-for-wet iguana.
In What a Whopper (1961), a struggling writer tries to drum up interest for his latest rejected book about the monster by faking sightings of his subject matter -- only to discover others had similar ideas, which concludes just as you’d expect with the real Nessie making an appearance, who literally, no, literally gives the audience a wink.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
The creature would also have glorified cameos in George Pal’s 7 Faces of Doctor Lao (1964) and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). Which brings us to Larry Buchanan’s The Loch Ness Horror (1982).
In the annals of movie history, aside from, maybe, Arch Oboler, there is a nary a bigger culprit, cinematically and inertly speaking, than Larry Buchanan in the 'tell don't show' form of movie-making. Loosely translated: We don't even get to watch the paint dry, we get to listen to somebody else describe the paint drying for about an hour and a half.
No. Wait. With Buchanan, it's more like listening to someone else describe how another person described paint drying on a wall for six straight hours. Talk is cheap, and film and FX cost money, after all, explaining why this filmmaker was responsible for several personal Cinematic Waterloos for even hardened viewers of pure schlock like Yours Truly.
“Perhaps no other independent filmmaker of the latter 20th century elicits such a disparity of response from general movie audiences and cult film buffs alike as Larry Buchanan,” noted Robert Craig in his book The Films of Larry Buchanan (2007). “The general public have likely never heard of him, even though many of his films have entered the popular lexicon of film mythology. Even in the rarefied air of cult film studies, Buchanan’s name provokes either gasps of horror or hushed sighs of awe.”
Larry Buchanan.
Me, personally, I’m more of a resigned, ‘lets just get through it’ when it comes to Buchanan’s films. I mean, how can you take the idea of President Nixon enlisting a rogue branch of the CIA to clandestinely assassinate the three 'Pied Pipers of rock and roll' and make it boring? Buchanan can, and he did, too. Still, if you can manage to kick and scratch your way through them, there are a few rewards to be found hither and yon. But you have to look really, really hard.
Born Marcus Larry Seale Jr. on January 21, 1923, in the tiny town of Lost Prairie, Texas, Buchanan’s mother would tragically pass away when he was only nine months old. His father, meanwhile, was a lawman, who survived a shootout with “Pretty Boy” Floyd Hamilton. This near brush with death would cause his father to preemptively place his children into the Buckner Orphans Home.
Constable Marcus Seale Sr.
Buchanan would never forgive his father for abandoning him, and would idolize his mother to the point of martyrdom. He would describe his time in the Baptist orphanage in scathing terms, saying any deviations were met with corporal punishment both “swift and terrifying.” The only bright spot, Buchanan recalled, would be the weekly screenings of movies in the rec hall. Said Craig, “Buchanan was able to endure his Jobian trials by reliving the previous week’s movie over and over in his mind. Movies, it could be said, saved his life.”
One film in particular, Frank Borzage’s melodrama History is Made at Night (1937), really struck a chord with a young Buchanan, who doubled down his obsession with movies and became determined to be a part of them someday.
After a massive sex scandal rocked the orphanage, a new regime took over and improved things considerably. Buchanan was chosen to be a traveling ambassador for the institution, essentially becoming a teenage evangelist not unlike Marjoe Gortner, raising funds for the orphanage. He eventually earned a scholarship to become a Baptist preacher, but despite his talent for bloviating scripture Buchanan found the whole notion of religion hypocritical and decided to pursue his dream.
Hitchhiking his way to Hollywood, Buchanan landed a job in 20th Century Fox’s prop department. From there, he would land a few extra roles and bit parts. And it was here, at the studio’s insistence, that he officially changed his name to Larry Buchanan. Here, Buchanan would also claim to have struck up a friendship with the newly minted Marilyn Monroe (alias Norma Jean Baker) when they were both contract wage slaves to the studio, which would factor into his later oeuvre.
George "Gabby" Hayes.
As his acting career stalled, Buchanan moved to New York, where he landed a job as writer, musical director, and performer on The Gabby Hayes Show (1950-1954). He then enlisted, where he served in the Army Signal Corps, where he starred in several training films but also started sliding in behind the camera, where he learned the nuts and bolts of filmmaking.
After his discharge, Buchanan hung around the Screen Building, which Craig called “the Mecca of New York indie filmmaking.” Here, Buchanan would become friends with Stanley Kubrick, who was working on the final edit of his first feature, Fear and Desire (1954). And while Kubrick would eventually disown the film as pretentious drivel, it got United Artists’ attention, who funded his second feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955), a much more assured neo-noir, which in turn got him a greenlight for The Killers (1956) and officially broke him into the big time.
Said Craig, “Buchanan watched this mercurial rise of a superstar director with awe and admiration, realizing the only salient rule to filmmaking was simplicity itself: make the damn film!” And this he did. And while he never reached the heights of Kubrick, not even close, Buchanan worked steadily throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.
After moving back to Texas, Buchanan completed a couple of short subjects -- The Cowboy (1951) and Grubsteak (alias Apache Gold, 1952), starring a young Jack Klugman. He then did a couple of Nudies with Venus in Furs (1956) and Naughty Dallas (alias A Stripper is Born, 1958), which was shot in Jack Ruby’s nightclub. But Buchanan’s next feature set the template for nearly everything that followed.
Based on a true story, Free, White and 21 (1963) centered on a black disc jockey falsely accused of rape by a white woman. "The incident is graphically recounted, with emphasis on its most sordid aspects, in language seldom heard on the screen," said critic Eugene Archer of The New York Times (1963). "Possibly some socially conscious spectators will find the subject matter significant enough to overlook the film's unconvincing dialogue, awkward acting and total absence of cinematic technique."
This kind of social commentary wrapped up in an exploitation shell would continue with High Yellow (1965), loosely based on Octave Mirabeau's novel Diary of a Chambermaid, where a mixed-race girl tries to pass as white.
Then came his first horror picture, The Naked Witch (1964), which was a collaboration with Claude Alexander, yet another drive-in chain owner looking to get into production. The total budget for the film was $8,000, and the end results makes you wonder where any of that money went.
A tale of resurrected east Texas witches with grease-paint eyebrows and a roller rink Wurlitzer soundtrack, the film also firmly established Buchanan’s modus operandi: a static camera; limited settings; inert plots, with lots of cheap, tell-don't-show inaction; and padding on top of padding -- be it transition or travelogue. And the cumulative imbecility of it all has been known to ruin watching movies in general for some.
Around this time Buchanan would also write, produce and direct his first alt-history production, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1964), where Jack Ruby misses and Oswald is put on trial for the murder of President Kennedy and police officer J.D. Tippett, which was shot in Dallas not long after the actual assassination. No verdict is reached, and it's left up to audiences to decide if the defendant is guilty or innocent.
Now, after wrapping on Free, White and 21, Buchanan screened the film for James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff, who agreed to distribute the film through American International Pictures. Liking what they saw on such a minuscule budget, Nicholson and Arkoff would commission Buchanan to make colorized remakes of some of their back catalog as part of a syndication package for their new television division -- AIP-TV.
The Tulsa World (November 9, 1968).
Known collectively as the Azalea Pictures, named after the street address of his production offices, this would result in eight micro-budgeted telefilms at $30,000 each: Attack of the Eye (Eye) Creatures (1967) was a remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957); Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1967) was a remake of It Conquered the World (1956); Creature of Destruction (1967) began life as The She-Creature (1956); In the Year 2889 (1969) was begat by Day the World Ended (1955); and Hell Raiders (1969) a rehash of Suicide Battalion (1958). The other three were original films: Mars Needs Women (1968), Curse of the Swamp Creature (1968) and It's Alive! (1969), not to be confused with Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive from 1974.
There was a ninth Azalea feature, A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970), which had an expanded budget and would get a theatrical release. A personal film for Buchanan, given the history with his father, when it was finished, AIP found it dull and too talky and charged Maury Dexter to reshoot several scenes with doubles to punch up the action. Buchanan also took the piss out of Arthur Penn’s glorification of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) with The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde (1968), which portrays the outlaws in a darker light.
And as we moved into the 1970s, Buchanan settled into a demented groove of revisionist bio-flicks, tin-foil hat conspiracy diatribes, and speculative cinema on everyone from Marylin Monroe with Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976) to Howard Hughes with Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell (1977). Not to mention his look at the mating habits of all kinds of critters with Sex and the Animals (1969), his ode to Ingmar Bergman, Strawberries Need Rain (1971), and the gonzo farce Mistress of the Apes (1979).
However, somehow, no matter how inspired the premise, Buchanan would take these incredibly novel and monumentally screwy ideas and drain nearly every ounce of momentum from them, making most a chore to sit through. But amidst all of that conspiratorial tedium and whackadoodle dreck was a strange anomaly in Buchanan's catalog; a throwback monster movie about the Loch Ness Monster.
The Mobile Register (May 30, 1982).
A tale of multiple Nessie hunters with polar opposite intentions, one to exploit, the other to study, it all seems simple enough. So simple that Buchanan had to throw in a few nonsensical subplots -- the German plane, the Mad Scot of Killie-Cranky Isle, the American tourists, and a homicidal interlude -- to fill up screen time.
But then things get even more convoluted when, from out of nowhere, a British military detachment arrives at Loch Ness. Led by Colonel Laughton (Hanson), he orders his Sergeant (Pillsbury) to set up several manned roadblocks to lock down and quarantine the whole area.
Meanwhile, back in the caravan, a hostage situation is brewing as Pratt spills his psychosis to Kathleen. He also feels the egg has stabilized enough that it is now safe to move it. And so, with his hostage trussed up in the back, Pratt hits the road. Oh, no! Who will ever save poor Kathleen now?!
Not Dean, he’s still out on the boat, playing with his diodes.
Never fear, Nessie is on the way!
Absolutely booking it through the surrounding woods, belching up smoke as it goes, Nessie catches up with the caravan right as Pratt tries to bluff his way past one of those military roadblocks.
It then takes out the two sentries rather quickly, but then takes its own sweet time in dispatching Pratt for stealing its egg.
Thus, Boils and Ghouls, we finally reach the absolute zenith of Larry Buchanan's film career:
But once the beast is done killing the villain, rather stupidly, it once more beats a hasty retreat back to the loch without its egg -- but not before taking a quick peek inside the caravan to make sure Kathleen was OK.
Who was that cross-eyed lake monster?!?
Meanwhile, Stuart is in a panic because his granddaughter never came home last night. Sanderson does his best to calm him down and tries to call around to see if anyone has seen her -- only to be told by the operator that all lines have been drafted by Laughton for military use only.
Now. Next, we have an open question to our female readers. Ready? OK. Riddle me this, ladies:
You've been kidnapped, trussed up in the back of a van, and just witnessed the Loch Ness Monster eat your kidnapper and two other people. What would you do next?
If your answer is to free yourself, return home, change into a dress to impress your new beau, whom all evidence says you don’t really like at all, and pretend it all never happened? If so, congrats! You, too, could write a movie about the Loch Ness Monster. (Oh, Larry. No, honey. No…)
Thus and dumb, as Kathleen changes clothes, Laughton orders his Sergeant to seek out a local, also an American because they apparently ran out of actors who could do a Scottish accent, who specialized in explosive harpoons. Laughton is more interested in the explosives though, because he needs them to destroy some evidence.
What evidence? We’re getting there. Turns out back in 1940, some Upper Class Twit of the Year was not manning his anti-aircraft battery and was instead involved with a prostitute at the local brothel. To avoid a scandal, it was reported that he shot down the MacGuffin -- sorry, the Nazi plane, which was carrying mines destined for the shipping lanes in the North Sea. This Twit then rode this notoriety to a seat in Parliament.
And not wanting his reputation tarnished, when word broke the plane was found intact at the bottom of the loch and not in pieces as it should’ve been, given the cover story, the Twit called in a favor, which resulted in Laughton’s attempt at a cover up.
But Stuart saw the whole thing back in 1940 and now threatens to blow the lid off of everything. The problem is, his evidence is about to be blown up.
And so, Dean and Kathleen, after she changes clothes again, again, race to his boat to try and stop the saboteurs.
Here, Kathleen pulls Dean aside and shows him the egg that Pratt tried to steal. They take it on the boat with them, and then gun the engines. But are they already too late?
Yes. Yes they are.
Well, if it’s any consolation, Nessie managed to kill that explosive expert as he set the charges around the plane wreck -- but not before he managed to detonate them, which destroys the plane completely and, alas, also takes out the monster, who dies in a geyser of blood.
You maniacs! You blew her up! Damn you. Damn you all to hell! *sigh* Goodbye, dear, sweet Nessie. *ahem* One big bowl of Plesiosaur soup comin' up.'
Thus, our movie ends with our hero tearing himself away from his fancy-schmancy sonar gear long enough to help Kathleen return the late Nessie’s still percolating egg to the bottom of the loch. Circle of life and all that.
According to an article by Barry Wigmore for The Daily Mirror (December 14, 1981), Larry Buchanan spent six months at Loch Ness, researching the legend of the monster, interviewing locals, while writing the script for The Loch Ness Horror.
“We loved it there,” Buchanan told Wigmore. “People were doing crazy things. We interviewed one character who plays Beethoven on the loch shores because he reckons Nessie will fall in love with the music. Another guy goes out every day with his fishing line trying to hook the monster. He throws any fish he catches back.”
"Rarrgh!"
You’ll notice he incorporated none of that into his shooting script, which instead contains several macguffins and multiple tedious plot threads that barely hang together. The film was co-written by Lynn Shubert, who also pitched in on the scripts for Buchanan’s Goodbye, Norma Jean and Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell.
But the whole thing comes off as rather juvenile, which might’ve been on purpose. “We went for a PG rating and we got it,” Buchanan told Janet Martineau for The Saginaw News (July 3, 1982). “We wanted to avoid the slice and dice kind of horror picture. There had been too many of them already.”
Then why the whole 'Nessie the 13th' interlude at the ruined castle with the madman and the axe? And the horny couple trying to have sex being stalked by him? Who is then killed rather brutally with his own weapon? This whole sequence was obviously aping the current Slasher trend. And if Buchanan’s efforts were to make fun of it or spoof it, he failed miserably.
Which brings us to another fatal flaw in nearly all of Buchanan’s narratives, no matter what the film: plotlines that either lead into cul de sacs, where they lose track of the exit and spin indefinitely, or come to rather blunt dead ends, where they are quickly excised from the narrative and forgotten by all involved, as if they never happened, except for those, you know, in the audience. Who were there the whole time. And saw them. And are left holding the bag. Looking at you, horny couple-murder-who-get eaten interlude. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about Kathleen post her abduction. It's truly maddening.
Beyond that all the usual Buchananisms are present and accounted for: lots of exposition and massive plot-dumps looped over nonsensical travelogue footage; poor day for night shooting; inexplicable Ed Woodian time jumps, and very little action -- and what little there is, usually happens offscreen, as we've been pointing out.
And while Buchanan spent six months at Loch Ness, he didn’t shoot a single frame of footage on location. Instead, he subbed in Lake Tahoe, which is located on the border between California and Nevada, which is not in Scotland.
All told, Lake Tahoe does a passable job as Loch Ness, given that it is a body of water, and there are shores and woodlands surrounding it. Buchanan probably never would’ve gotten permission to film on the actual Loch due to all the pyrotechnics involved. Then again, he didn’t really ask permission to blow things up at Lake Tahoe either as the film was shot clandestinely.
“We kept it a secret because we didn’t want people watching and finding out the ending,” Buchanan told Wigmore. Which I don’t believe for one second. More likely he filmed in secret to skirt around any permissions or permits.
Also of note, like a lot of Buchanan’s later films, the production was a total family affair, as the credits are chock full of all kinds of Buchanans as proof. “By 1982 I thought it was time for a family picture -- that is, a film of, by, with, and for the Buchanan clan,” said Buchanan in his autobiography, It Came from Hunger: Tales of a Cinema Schlockmeister (2016).
Behind the scenes, his wife Jane served as an executive producer; son Randy Buchanan served as the film’s editor, while Jeff Buchanan was the best boy or gofer for multiple departments; and daughter Dee Buchanan was both the script supervisor and took on the role of an extra among the college tourists.
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Also littering the credits was Irvin Berwick, who served as an associate producer. Berwick was no stranger to this kind of aquatic horror movie, having produced and directed The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959). He then left monsters behind for awhile, making deranged juvenile delinquent pictures for Crown International like Hitchhike to Hell (1977) and Malibu High (1979), one of the most amazing movies I have ever seen. You will believe a student will blackmail her teachers with sex for higher grades and then become a hired hitman for the mob.
Meanwhile, taking on the lead of Spenser Dean was another Buchanan. Barry Buchanan wasn’t that terrible in the role but his character as written is kind of a dope -- not helped by being saddled with the radio call-sign ‘Wet Bottom.’ He had appeared in a few bit parts in his father’s other films, and would show up in Neon Maniacs (1986) for a hot minute and not much else.
The Loch Ness Horror was also the cinematic debut of Miki McKenzie, which would also be her swan song. According to Buchanan, McKenzie actually was Scottish, and so, she does the best with her accent. Again, the script does her no favors at all but she comes off sweet and sassy enough. Yes, she has zero chemistry with her co-star, but they’re both harmless -- unfortunately for the film, to the point of inanity.
The most seasoned actor was Sandy Kenyon, whose Sanderson comes off as the best of the lot. Kenyon is one of those guys; an actor whose face you recognize but can’t put a name to. He had been acting since the early 1950s, mostly in television, including a trio of Twilight Zone Episodes: "The Odyssey of Flight 33" (S2.E18, 1961), where a jetliner goes back in time, "The Shelter" (S3.E3, 1961), a great parable on doomsday prepping, and "Valley of the Shadow" (S4.E3, 1963).
He also appeared in The Outer Limits episode "Counterweight" (S2.E14), where he played one of the volunteers on a simulated spaceflight, and a really good sci-fi yarn called Lifepod (1981) that overachieved well beyond its meager budget.
And playing one half of that horny couple was Eric Scott, probably best remembered for playing son Ben on The Waltons (1972-1981). With that hat covering his trademark red hair, it's understandable if you missed him. And playing his ditzy girlfriend was Scott’s wife, Karey-Louis.
The craziest thing about that whole murder interlude was, thanks to Buchanan’s piss-poor use of day for night filters, I honestly thought that Jack Stuart and the Mad Scot of Killie-Kranky Isle were the same guy. And then imagine my surprise when Stuart showed up later when I thought he had taken an axe to the head? To quote from my notes: “Waitaminute. I thought he was dead?!? Oh, that must have been the OTHER Mad Scot of Killie-Cranky Isle. Then who the hell was that other guy?!?”
“Everyone should see [The Loch Ness Horror] because I get eaten by the monster,” said Scott in an interview with Joseph LeValley for The Globe-Gazette (February 8, 1982) “It looked just like Dino on The Flintstones.”
The Daily Record (December 12, 1981).
Now, one of the few bright spots in The Loch Ness Horror was the technical triumph of the monster itself in spite of being created on a Buchanan budget. Coming off as nothing more than an inflatable pool toy in some shots, the monster’s plastic origins were obvious but it was still light years ahead of the threadbare creatures from the Azalea films.
“Beneath the foam skin, the thirty-foot Nessie is a complicated machine made up of stainless steel tubes and the sort of hydraulics used to move the wing flaps and undercarriages in airplanes,” reported Wigmore (The Daily Mirror, 1981). The contraption was designed and built by Peter Chesney with an assist from Tom Valentine. As designed, the creature could perform eleven different movements, from “wrinkling her nose, to rolling her eyes, to spraying smoke from her nostrils.”
The Daily Mirror (December 14, 1981).
According to Widmore, the prop came in at 40 tons and at a cost of $60,000. (Again, don’t buy that figure for a second.) “When we put her together she had a terrible squint, a sort of monstrous Marty Feldman,” said Valentine (The Daily Mirror, 1981). “We had to cut open the back of her head and do a quick job with a welding torch to realign her eyes.”
I’m not sure they should’ve bothered with the face lift as the creature’s crossed eyes and permanent grin, with those perfect teeth, make the creature look slightly teched in the head. And to me, Nessie's loopy appearance only adds another layer of delirium to the proceedings.
Still, the fully animatronic, go-motion creature runs rather smoothly (better, dare I say, than Bruce the shark ever did), and, to the directors credit, he shot it as effectively as it could be shot considering the limitations. For the land scenes, where it was most effective, the head was mounted on a trailer that could be maneuvered around like a giant pull toy. In the water there appeared to be two pieces, the head and the hump.
The Loch Ness Horror would be Chesney’s inaugural effort in creature effects, and he would follow that up with the even more demented Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984). But he would soon graduate to bigger budgets and better films with some amazing results in things like Honey I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Waterworld (1995), and Men in Black (1997).
Amazon Women on the Moon (1987).
And believe it or not, The Loch Ness Horror would not be the only screen appearance of his first creation, as it would appear again in Joe Dante’s “Bullshit or Not” segment of Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), a riff on Ripley’s Believe it or Not, where they take a deep dive on the theory that Jack the Ripper was really the Loch Ness Monster all along. Believe it, or not. Or, whatever.
The Loch Ness Horror would get an extremely limited theatrical run through M&M Films in 1982. From what I could tell it only played in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama before officially petering out in Tennessee in January, 1983. And despite all efforts, I could find no contemporary critical reviews for it, meaning what little audiences there were, were on their own and had no idea what they were stumbling into despite some pretty spectacular poster art.
The Memphis Press Scimitar (January 1, 1983).
“I suspect I might first have been recognized for the wrong reasons,” Buchanan later confessed in an interview with The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (1997). “It kind of stung, at first, to be singled out as a maker of movies that are considered ‘so bad they’re good,’ but then you’ve got to realize the only bad recognition is no recognition … I don’t know that I bring any great command of the art to my pictures, but I love what I’m doing, and I believe that shows through in the least of my pictures. We certainly weren’t trying to make anybody laugh. We meant to entertain, perhaps to provoke, to enlighten -- and certainly to defy the customary formulas.”
But I think Margalit Fox summed up his film efforts the best, writing in Buchanan’s obituary for The New York Times (December 19, 2004), “One quality united Mr. Buchanan's diverse output: It was not so much that his films were bad; they were deeply, dazzlingly, unrepentantly bad. His work called to mind a famous line from H.L. Mencken, who, describing President Warren G. Harding's prose, said, ‘It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.’”
All told, over the years, I have given Larry Buchanan a ton of grief over the quality of his films. I personally don’t subscribe to the notion that they’re so bad they’re good, I think they’re just plain bad and, worst of all, tedious and boring. I’ve always preferred the chutzpah of Arch Hall Sr., the weird and wonky art of Ray Dennis Steckler, and the general 'WTF are you even doing' of Ted V. Mikels or Andy Milligan.
I’d say if you had to watch one Buchanan film, I would go for Goodbye, Norma Jean, where Misty Rowe played a young Marilyn Monroe looking for her big break in the seediest of places in 1940s Hollywood, which I actually think is kinda good, thanks mostly to Rowe’s performance, and is easily Buchanan’s best film.
But I would say The Loch Ness Horror is probably the most … digestible? As far as Buchanan’s oeuvre goes. It’s a lode of complete hooey, and the horror is non-existent, but that monster sure is one helluva scream. And thanks to Buchanan, as always, for all the wrong reasons.
Originally posted on October 10, 2025, at Confirmed, Alan_01.
The Loch Ness Horror (1982) Clan Buchanan :: Omni-Leasure International :: M&M Films / EP: Jane Buchanan / P: Larry Buchanan, John F. Rickert / AP: Irvin Berwick / D: Larry Buchanan / W: Larry Buchanan, Lynn Shubert / C: Robert Ebinger / E: Randy Buchanan / M: Richard H. Theiss / S: Sandy Kenyon, Miki McKenzie, Barry Buchanan, Doc Livingston, Stuart Lancaster, Preston Hanson, Garth Pillsbury, David Clover, Ronald Cohen, Pat Musick, Eric Scott, Karey-Louis Scott
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