the movieGOOMBA

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It was just about a year ago when I was perusing cnn.com and I stumbled across a link to a streaming video of latest "evidence" supporting the existing of the Loch Ness Monster. Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of good old Nessy, but that video sure as heck gave me a weird feeling. What lives below the water already creeps me out, and to have an unidentified, supposed giant animal in the lake's depths gives me the heebie jeebies. Strangely, it's also kind of cool. It opens up this huge array of imaginative ideas, and it's representative of how the unknown can draws us in.

So The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. A family film set in Scotland during World War II. Young Angus finds a strange rock out on the shore, and once its found, it hatches into a water horse. As the fable goes, there can only be one water horse in the world at a time, and once its born, it begins to depend on Angus for food and friendship. Eventually, the monster gets too large for the bath tub, and Angus is forced to move it to the lake for more room and food.

There's quite a serious side-plot with the war and Angus's father, and I can't help but sense a kind of abandonment from reality. You know Narnia? Kind of like that. The children are in this horrendous situation, and they venture to a different world where they're not orphans, they're the royal family. Or remember that one Buffy episode where she wakes up and she's actually in a mental institution suffering from schizophrenia and her alternate reality is at Sunnydale/the Hell Mouth? I kind of got that same sense from this film and I thought it was worth mentioning.

The CG was pretty great. Crusoe, the water horse pet, was pretty darn cute as a cub, and it acted as real as a monster could act in my opinion. But I say boo to the story and boo to the Free Willy reenactment. This movie fails as family film. It was sad and kind of shallow as far as character and plot development go. I can't recommend it, and it certainly won't come back as a classic.