I try to grade B-movies for originality, but there are limits. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a gigantic whale pile-drive a nuclear submarine and jump out of the water with it in its mouth. I’ve definitely never seen it done this implausibly. What a plausible version of the sequence would look like I leave as an exercise to the reader. I’m reminded of something Roger Ebert, that under-appreciated connoisseur of genre films, wrote in his review of Pink Flamingos:
How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood.
“He’s the best geek in the business,” this man assured me.
“What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?” I asked.
“You wanna examine the chickens?”
Asylum (shudder) has about cornered the market on low-order ripoffs, re-imaginings, and assorted crap. They’re the fine folks behind American Warships and Atlantic Rim, shameless copies of Battleship and Pacific Rim. They also made Nazis at the Center of the Earth, a modern version of of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of Earth but in incredibly poor taste.
Anyway, today Asylum’s proffering 2010: Moby Dick, a modern re-imagining of the Melville classic (which I haven’t read). Our Ahab was a lieutenant on the aforementioned devoured submarine back ’69, and he’s out for revenge in the present about the modern USS Pequod. We meet him about twenty minutes in, played by Barry Bostwick (as seen in 1982’s…something…Megaforce). He’s full-blown loon from the get-go. Our tame scientist is played by Renee O’Connor, who’s clearly come down in the world.
Like most Asylum movies, the interior lighting is just awful. Either they can’t afford to do it properly or think dark rooms like cool. Gordon Willis can get away with this because he’s awesome and the Godfather movies called for it. In general I’ve found professional offices are well-lit. Asylum should look into that.
We’re spending a lot of time underwater (good for Asylum since it lets them have even more dark lighting). There’s a long, interminable fight between another submarine, the USS Essex, and the whale. People ragged on the underwater effects from The Hunt for Red October but these are vastly worse. It also steals the hot-running torpedo from the final battle in that movie, except it’s cheap and implausible.
The acting is pretty bad all around. None of the military characters are plausible: they’re too high-strung. Everyone’s always challenging everyone else’s orders. Renee O’Connor spends the whole movie listening to Ahab’s cassette recording from the 1969 attack and making faces. Bostwick does his loon thing only it’s boring.
Asylum movies are maximally frustrating because you can never figure out why the hell someone made it. Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space is terrible, yes, but it at least represented someone’s personal vision. Why was this movie even made? We’ve had a sci-fi version of Moby Dick; it was called Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn and it was awesome.
Now Moby Dick has attacked a cruise ship. It’s not clear why. Ahab has fashioned a harpoon from the remains of his first submarine and he uses that, instead of the nuclear weapons his sub carries (note that American attack submarines do not carry nuclear weapons in peacetime). So of course they become entangled with the Moby Dick and get dragged to crush death and everyone dies–
Damn, they blew their tanks and lived. The movie continues with a really cheap effect of the sub surfacing. There’s also a bunch of stupid tension between Ahab and his Executive Officer (XO) which isn’t done well. We then have a chase sequence in which a V-22 Osprey strafes Moby Dick. This doesn’t work well, either as an idea or a sequence.
Barry Bostwick is now dripping his blood on a harpoon and getting in to a Zodiac. This seems like a bad plan when you’re going up against the reused wire model from Megashark. Bostwick looks like Tom Waits from Dracula. The sub’s sonar sounds like the Martian attack ships from George Pal’s War of the Worlds (probably is, at that).
SPOILER: the whale surfaces beneath the morons in the Zodiacs, scattering everyone, and small arms fire proves ineffective. Time passes.
The whale has jumped over the atoll. I say again, the whale has jumped over the atoll. Bostwick is frowning a lot. He harpoons Moby Dick and dies. Now the whale has destroyed the Pequod, but not before it fires nuclear torpedoes, destroying the atoll and killing the rest of the movie’s characters, except Renee O’Connor (Final Girl Death Exemption).
Wikipedia says they blew $500,000 on this. That’s less than the price of a new passenger rail car. Next time I’m on a train I’m going to ponder that factoid.
