Loch Ness is a 1996 American family adventure-drama film directed by John Henderson and starring Ted Danson, Joely Richardson, James Frain and Ian Holm. Jim Henson's Creature Shop also worked on the movie.
Disgraced and cynical American Scientist Dr. Jonathan Dempsey (Danson) is sent to Loch Ness, Scotland to disprove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster and while there he begins to form a bond with local innkeeper Laura (Richardson) and her daughter Isabel.
This film contains examples of:
- Accidental Misnaming: Dr. Mercer carelessly calls Adrian "Adam", as an indicator of his insensitive nature.
- Agent Mulder: Adrian is all-in on the existence of the creature, and takes it very hard when it looks like there is no monster. Dempsey admits to him that he used to be this as well, and would love nothing better than to find Nessie.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- It's unlikely that Loch Ness would have enough food to a support a breeding population of Plesiosaurs. Nor would said population likely be able to maintain a healthy amount of genetic diversity for very long before running into the problem of inbreeding.
- Adrian, upon seeing Dempsey's photos of the monsters, definitively states that they are "a hybrid of plesiosaur and elasmosaur", a suggestion that doesn't make a ton of sense and would certainly not be clear just from looking at them.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Characters occasionally refer to Nessie — posited as a surviving plesiosaurid — as an "aquatic dinosaur", which the plesiosaurs were not, they were in fact aquatic reptiles that just happened to have existed at the same time as the dinosaurs. Characters also frequently undershoot how long ago the plesiosaurs are supposed to have gone extinct, with the bailiff giving a timeframe of about 15,000 years and Adrian speculating that a colony might have become isolated in the loch at the end of the Ice Age. The conventional wisdom is that plesiosaurs went extinct some 66,000,000 years ago, around the same time as non-avian dinosaurs, long before the Ice Age.
- Ass Shove: At the beginning, Dempsey tells Dr. Mercer to take the entire loch and shove it. This being a family film, he doesn't say where, but it's implied.
- Attack of the Monster Appendage: Not an attack, but Dr Abernathy, on emergence from the Loch of something off-screen, photographs a large flipper.
- Babies Ever After: There is a baby Nessie seen in the movie's final shot, signaling that the population is sustainable if left alone.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Laura and Dempsey don't much care for each other at first, but fall in love over the course of the movie.
- Benevolent Monsters / Gentle Giant: The monsters are non-aggressive plesiosaurs. When we finally see them, they're visibly munching on seaweed, suggesting that they are at least partly herbivorous.
- One of the monsters even appears to have saved Dempsey from drowning after it collided with the boat, during the collision Dempsey is knocked unconscious and sinking towards the bottom of the Loch and the monster can be seen swimming close-by yet when Adrian who swam to the surface is frantically looking around and calling for him John suddenly surfaces despite still being unconscious, implying that the monster pushed him towards the surface, something that real-life whales and dolphins have been known to do.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Dempsey had his academic career ruined after trying to prove the existence of the Sasquatch.
- Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The three main leads; Laura (blonde), Dempsey (brunet), and Isabel (redhead).
- Cat Scare: A pretty classic one before Nessie finally appears, albeit with an otter in place of a cat.
- Disappeared Dad: We're given no details on Isabel's father. For whatever reason, he's not in the picture.
- Eagle Land: Dempsey's American cynicism is contrasted with the old-world idealistic outlook of the Scottish locals. The town kook also tells Dempsey to go invade a country in South America instead of bothering them at the loch, which is a bit rich given Scotland's own imperialist history.
- Easily Forgiven: When Dempsey returns at the end of the movie, Laura and Isabelle spot his car and are happy to see him with Laura kissing him after they reenact their first interaction, even though there is no indication that they are aware he decided to keep the Loch Ness monsters existence secret.
- Foreshadowing: Isabel is extremely insistent on what a kelpie sounds like. This foreshadows that she is quite familiar with them. When we finally see them, they make a sound very much like the one she imitated earlier.
- First-Name Basis: After their first overtly romantic moment together, Dempsey tells Laura to call him Jonathan.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: When Crazy Jealous Guy Andy is whaling on Dempsey, Laura intervenes by breaking a bottle over his head. There's a rather funny bit of business when an elderly regular deliberates over which bottle to hand her, not wanting to waste good whisky.
- Humble Goal: When Dempsey tells Isabel that he'd like to see the monster more than anything else in the world, she tells him what she'd like best of anything in the world: a red bicycle. He tells her she has a deal.
- Idiot Ball: After the Bailiff says that the plesiosaurs in the Loch have survived for thousands of years without human intervention, Dempsey catches the idiot ball when he fails to argue that, while it may be true that the creatures don’t require human interference for day-to-day survival but scientifically proving their existence would mean they could then classify them as an endangered species and laws could be passed to protect them and their environment specifically from threats by human activity such as Nessie-hunters deliberately going onto the loch searching for them or pollution as the Bailiff and Isabel were seen cleaning up earlier in the movie.
- Monster Delay: A non-horror example. When we finally see the monsters, it's a moment of awe and wonder. The effects hold up okay for a movie from '96.
- The Münchausen: One of the elderly pub regulars is frequently heard telling outlandish yarns about his family.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Having developed the late Dr Abernathy's photo of a large, emerging flipper, Dempsey drags Adrian on one more search of the Loch. Their sonar detects a school of salmon fleeing a larger object — which Dempsey then determines to be forty feet long. Adrian tries to get a camera focus, but, due to the object's speed, all they show is a purple blur. The object then crashes into the boat...
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Water Bailiff conspires with a few of the locals to sabotage Dempsey's sonar equipment, presumably to keep Dempsey from killing the legend and disproving the monster's existence. It turns out he was Good All Along and was afraid Dempsey would find the monsters, and is simply trying to keep them safe.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Comes with the territory for this kind of movie.
- Our Kelpies Are Different: The Loch Ness monster is frequently referred to as kelpies, although they are clearly depicted as flesh-and-blood plesiosaurs rather than magical shapeshifters.
- Pet the Dog: Dempsey is bit of a jerk to most people around him for the first part of the movie. When he meets Isabel, a nine year-old child, however, he clearly checks his attitude and makes a point of being nice to her, showing the audience that he's not all bad. This also applies in-universe, as seeing how good Dempsey is with the kid is one of the reasons Laura warms up to him.
- Psychic Powers: Downplayed with Isabel, who seems preternaturally aware of what's going on around her and is uncommonly good at poker. Laura claims it runs in the family (although skips a generation with her), and that her own mother could read fortunes as well.
- Scenery Porn: The vast Loch, and its lush, tranquil setting get an atmospheric showcasing.
- Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Dempsey is a disappointed idealist, a man who used to firmly believe in cryptids until a hunt for Bigfoot cost him him academic respectability and, ultimately, his marriage. When Adrian calls him out on his closed-minded attitude towards the possibility of Nessie's existence, Dempsey counters that he would love to be proven wrong and to find the creature, but he's accepted that the world is terrible and that monsters are just something we make up to distract ourselves from it. At the end of the movie, naturally, he gets over this mindset.
- Sleepwalking: When Dempsey goes out on the lake, Laura mentions to a few of her neighbours at the local general store that he walks in his sleep as an example of his Cloudcuckoolander tendencies. And he Sleeps in the Nude.
- Stock Ness Monster: Dempsey arrives in Scotland with the intention of disproving the existence of the Loch Ness monster, he ends up disproving his own evidence when he discovers a population of plesiosaurs live in the Loch.
- The World Is Not Ready: Laura knows the creature exists, but keeps it a secret for this reason. At the end, she and the water bailiff convince Dempsey not to reveal the truth.
- Took a Level in Idealism: On developing the late Dr Abernathy's photo of what appears to be a large flipper, the cynical Dempsey, cautiously excited, drags Adrian on one more search of the Loch — whereupon something forty feet long capsizes the boat.
- You Need to Get Laid: A family-friendly variation, when Isabel tells Laura "You're lonely." Izzy consistently plays matchmaking between her mother and Dempsey, with varying degrees of subtlety. When they have their Big Damn Kiss at the end, she can be seen in the background dancing with pure joy.
