The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007)

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.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)

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.