There have been films about the Loch Ness Monster pretty much from the beginning—the first movie about the monster released in 1934 (a film edited by future Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean), only a year after the first noteworthy sightings took place. Needless to say, very few of them are particularly noteworthy, so The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep can take the crown as both the most well-known Loch Ness Monster movie and the best one almost by default (I’ve already written about the only other contender.) Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith (whose book The Sheep Pig was adapted in the movie Babe), Water Horse is pitched as a traditional sort of whimsical family movie, with a cast of respected British thespians and the structure of a “child befriends an animal” story enlivened with fantastical elements ala ET. It burnishes this well-worn plot by taking advantage of the historical context of the Loch Ness Monster story, arguing why a legend like this may have resonated in an era of strife.
Years ago, I wrote about my initiation into the…fandom?…of Cryptozoology and other stories of unexplained phenomenon through books and TV programs like Animal X, which focused entirely on cryptids and other weird animal anecdotes. In the grand scheme of things, a show like Animal X was niche, a foreign import that found its way into circulation during the strange expansion days of cable TV—even a broader-minded program in a similar vein like the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search Of… (a recurring topic on my other website) was mostly a minor staple of syndication. These series have snuck their way into the nostalgic memories of lifelong channel surfers, and likely introduced more people to the many mystery monsters of the world…but I imagine that even more people were introduced to Cryptozoology through the most mainstream mysterious phenomenon TV show, Unsolved Mysteries.
Its credentials as an actual hit are pretty evident: the initial run, which like In Search Of… started out as a series of specials, ran for fourteen straight years on three channels, including two of the big networks (NBC from 1987 to 1997, and CBS from 1997 to 1999) and one cable network (Lifetime, from 2000-2002); it almost certainly became another staple of syndication in that timeframe as well, and was recently revived in a revised form on Netflix. A series like that doesn’t go on for that long and end up with hundreds of episodes without being seen by a few people, and the trick to getting this type of show in front of so many eyeballs is ingenious: it’s a Trojan Horse, of sorts. From its inception, Unsolved Mysteries was a true crime docu-series, focusing on murders, robberies, disappearances, separated families and other down-to-earth cases—it’s a good example of what the genre was like before the more recent trends in True Crime “entertainment.” This makes it cheap to produce for networks, and it even includes an audience participation angle, with a telephone line open to hear from people who may have information that will crack those cold cases, with subsequent episodes providing updates on previous stories that showed that this hotline actually worked.
When it became a full weekly series in 1988, the show expanded its range of topics to include different sorts of mysteries, including supposed supernatural phenomena: UFOs, hauntings, and starting in a first season episode from 1989, monster legends. One could question the taste of putting stories with genuine pleas to help reunite families and solve violent crimes to give people closure next to sensationalism about crop circles and Bigfoot, but it’s the exact sort of gleefully tone-ignorant juxtaposition you expect to see on television. These things are all “mysteries”, and so they are jumbled together regardless of their actual content (I do wonder how many phone calls they got with “information” about the weirdo stuff.) In any case, this means that the sorts of people who would initially watch a series about real crimes were, more often than not, also exposed to some of the most well-known cryptids, and maybe even came away convinced that they’re real—and believer or not, other people came away from the show with the memories of these creatures burned into their memory thanks to the dark and menacing atmosphere the show imbued in their portrayal.
As we edge closer to the release of one of the biggest kaiju films in recent memory, it seems like a good time for this column to cover some of the lesser-known entries of the genre. Specifically, I’ll be writing about the lesser-known entries made by Toho, who obviously needed something monster-related to put out in between Godzilla movies, and so has a wide swathe of giant monsters that will probably not be making a cameo in any Hollywood movies anytime soon, but are still part of the canon, and also represent different eras in the studio’s monster history.
Daikaiju Baran (English translation Giant Monster Varan, although the actual English title is the superlative Varan the Unbelievable) was the fifth of Toho’s giant monster movies released since Godzilla in 1954, and the fourth of them directed by Godzilla’s Ishiro Honda (yes, we’re counting The Mysterians in that, even though it’s not strictly a giant monster movie, but look here buddy, they consider it part of the sequence, so I do, too) alongside special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya—looking back on it, that level of productivity in such a short time frame feels almost, well, unbelievable. Varan is once again filmed in black-and-white, which seems like a step back from the full-colour spectacles of Honda and Tsuburaya’s Rodan and Mysterians, but the conditions under which it was made explain why: this was initially conceived as a joint venture between Toho and an American film company, and was supposed to be made for television—the Americans eventually dropped out, and the film was shown theatrically in Japan (where, based on the title, they find things like Varan to be totally believable), with the Unbelievable English language version being released on TV in 1962, hacked to pieces and with scenes of American actors inserted so American viewers wouldn’t be threatened by a blatantly foreign film (I guess), just like most of Toho’s monster movies. I watched the Japanese original, so as much as I’d like to keep inserting the Unbelievable into this post, it technically wouldn’t be accurate, and I’m all about accuracy.
That this movie was originally made for television in mind might explain why it feels like it has a much smaller scope than its predecessors—a very straightforward plot without a lot of the cultural meaning of Godzilla, or the showmanship of Rodan. This is probably why it’s often been relegated to the lower tiers of the Toho monster oeuvre, with its titular monster mostly making cameos in movies like Destroy All Monsters (as well as in merchandise, including video games and even action figures released outside Japan—I remember when the Varan action from Trendmasters’ mid-nineties Godzilla line was rare and highly sought-after by collectors.) But even if this movie mostly just feels like “another one of those” in many ways, with less of a sense of scale than most other kaiju movies, you can still see bits and pieces of those other movies within it, showing that it still carries the torch fairly early on in their decades-long reign.
Very few comedy shows hooked me as hard as The Mighty Boosh did when I first watched it—it was unlike anything I had ever seen before, a show with a mastery of quirky, fast-paced dialogue and utterly ridiculous stories, coupled with catchy original music. It was among a wave of cult-forming British comedies that all debuted in the mid-two-thousands—Peep Show, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, just to name a few—but what made it stand out was also probably what made me love it: the cartoonish world it presented, with outlandish fantasy plots and characters. As we are told in the theme song, we are being taken on a journey through time and space, and almost every one of its twenty episodes features one of its central cast (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, and Rich Fulcher) playing an over-the-top costumed character, which was more often than not some kind of goofy monster—sometimes, the show almost feels like a art school comedy take on Doctor Who.
No episode demonstrates The Mighty Boosh‘s capacity for monster-based merriment better than what may be its most well-known one, series 2’s “The Legend of Old Gregg.” For whatever reason, this one blew up, and managed to even reach outside the regular BBC Three audience—I distinctly remember seeing clips from it passed around by people who never mentioned watching the show before. Although it isn’t my favourite episode of the series, it does have a lot of the elements that made it so unique, including another amazing song and a memorable performance from Noel Fielding as the titular character.
Incident at Loch Ness is a postmodern film to the extreme, a mockumentary that jumps from tone to tone and exploits preconceptions about certain filmmakers and genres—a film about the making of a film, with a separate documentary crew filming someone else making a different documentary. Despite starring legendary director Werner Herzog, it is not actually one of his movies, and honestly doesn’t even really try to replicate the feeling of his documentaries despite clearly playing off his ideas of “fact vs reality”/ecstatic truth and his reputation as a rogue filmmaker. Really, it feels much more Hollywood, which is also one of the central jokes here, but at times goes far beyond self-parody—this is the kind of movie where Jeff Goldblum and Crispin Glover can show up for cameos, and where all the featured players are film industry people playing themselves, including screenwriter Zak Penn (he of such films as X2: X-Men United and Behind Enemy Lines, and the actual director of this movie) playing the ultimate pathetic movie hack. All of that gets centred around the Loch Ness Monster, which makes total sense for a film about what is or isn’t real.
Anyone with any experience watching a television program about unexplained phenomenon will probably have their completely rote structure memorized: give basic background information, rattle off famous stories about the phenomenon, interview an eyewitness or two, interview so-called “expert”, interview skeptic denouncing the phenomenon, mention that the sheer number of eyewitnesses means that “something must be out there”, and end on a completely inconclusive note. Be sure not to scrutinize any piece of evidence or any claims made during the interviews (the talking heads are usually completely separate, and do not get to interact at all with any of the others—every statement is left free-floating)—this is TV, after all, and you only have a specific timeslot and finite audience attention span. The point of these sorts of shows was to never provide any sort of definitive statement on anything, so they couldn’t be called a rube or a spoilsport—maybe these things are true, maybe they aren’t, maybe someday we’ll find out, who knows? It’s the old “just asking questions” canard at its mushiest, its most weaselly.
I, of course, know this because I’ve seen so much of it. As a kid, I would tune into these shows whenever they aired, absorbing their rhythms, never really caring that one show about Bigfoot rarely presented any new information compared to the previous one I watched. It remained endlessly fascinating to me, this shadow world of phantom organisms that eluded discovery and the few devoted cranks forever maintaining their faith that they would some day be vindicated.
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