’Tis the season for heartwarming family movies featuring familiar actors playing Mom or Dad while the kids discover magic in one form or another. For our lake-monster chapter, it’s Mark Harmon (often shirtless—he was a sex symbol back in 1995) and an Ogopogo-adjacent Canadian lake monster starring in Magic in the Water. There’s spectacular glacial-lake scenery. And plenty of drama, both in the family and in the lake.
Mark Harmon is very divorced workaholic radio-host dad Jack Black (really) dragging his two kids (teen Josh and tween Ashley) to Canada on vacation. Jack is there to write a book. The kids are there because it’s Dad’s turn to have the kids.
Dad works. Kids are bored. Kids find trouble to get into. Bad trouble, good trouble. Supernatural trouble.
They’ve rented a very odd structure in the town of Glenorky, home of Orky the tourist attraction. There’s a mysterious old Native American man who watches mysteriously from various portions of the property, a pretty blonde doctor who oversees a therapy group of very odd men, a Japanese research expedition with the latest cool tools and a small boy named Hiro, and a gang of bad guys who are doing something nefarious involving boats and noxiously leaking fifty-gallon drums. And, of course, there’s something in the water.
Also, Oreos. And not just any Oreos. Double-stuffed.
I have now watched a 124-minute commercial for Double-Stuf Oreos™. Which entirely coincidentally are having their fiftieth anniversary this year.
Ashley is an addict. She has an unending supply of extra-thickly-stuffed chocolate sandwich cookies. She eats them in the car. She eats them in the house. She stuffs them into the pockets of her nightgown. She feeds them to whatever is in the water.
Whatever is in the water is also an Oreo addict. But it only eats the insides. It leaves the cookies neatly lined up on the dock, precisely stacked in pairs. (Don’t ask how, considering what we’ll learn about its anatomy. I suspect telekinesis.)
Gradually we discover what’s in the water. We see it mostly by what it does. It makes a deep droning sound. It zooms along, leaving a high wake. Sometimes we see it swirling the water, and often the swirlies sparkle. Other times we see a pair of boys in a dinghy, while fish fly up out of the water and into their nets. Ashley notices a stinky smell when it’s nearby; the smell is an important clue.
A whole group of men claim to have seen it and interacted with it. They feel as if it’s inhabiting their bodies. They’re full of intense joy and fear. It’s transformed each of them in noticeable ways.
Dr. Wanda Bell is trying to cure these men of what she believes to be their common psychosis. She’s keeping the mysterious Native American man sedated for the same reason. His name is Uncle Kipper, and he knows things.
Uncle Kipper escapes with the help of Ashley and Josh, and guides them to a statue of Orky. Long ago, he tells them, men could transform into animals and animals into men. They could be anything they wanted. Now when we dream of flying, we’re dreaming of that time.
Orky has telepathic powers. He’s communicating with Dr. Bell’s therapy group, and he’s made a connection with Ashley. He needs humans to know about the toxic waste that’s being dumped secretly into the lake. It’s made him deathly ill, and is killing fish and poisoning the water.
Unfortunately, by the time the humans get a clue, it’s too late. Jack has been possessed by the monster and has found his inner child, and in the process, he’s literally fallen into the monster’s cave underneath the lake. The kids have found it from another direction, by catching the evil toxic-waste dumpers and hijacking their submarine.
The submarine is disguised as a fake Orky. The bad guys are trying to use it as a diversion, to keep the authorities from finding their dumping site. The kids derail the plot but nearly die when the sub springs a leak and sinks.
The real Orky rescues the sunken sub and brings it back to the cave, where he lies down to die. There, finally, we see the actual animal. He looks kind of like a dragon and kind of like a hippo, with a hint of rhinoceros. He has light grey, wrinkly skin, a blobby body with a shortish tail and flippers, and a huge, human-like blue eye with a white iris.
Then he’s gone and his friends are all in mourning, but determined not to let him become a media circus. Ashley connects telepathically with Uncle Kipper, who is at the statue, singing and drumming. She takes up the song beside the hole her father dug into the cave, even while the authorities are insisting on sending a man to see what’s down there.
The gods, or the earth, or Orky’s powers, make sure that doesn’t happen. The secret is safe. Orky’s cave becomes his tomb.
But is he dead? “He’s only gone if you want him to be,” says Jack. Jack is a new and very different man.
Ashley and Josh and Hiro (who only speaks Japanese, but Ashley understands him perfectly) take his words to heart. They know what to do. Watch the water. See what the fish do around the boys in the dinghy. Line up the Oreos on the dock, and wait.
It’s all in what you believe. And in what is (or isn’t) in between the two chocolate cookies.
