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.

Here’s the pitch: it’s an Alien rip-off set on an oil rig. No, not Proteus. That’s the one with the heroin smugglers. No, not Leviathan either. That’s the one with Peter Weller. This one stars William Forsythe (Stone Cold).

This looks like it was shot for TV. The color is washed out and almost Matrix-like in the use of green. It’s really unpleasant to look at. The CGI is used sparingly but it’s not very good. I swear the helipad looks like an optical drive.

Oh boy are we in for a long haul. There’s a decent ambiguous opening involving a robotic submersible, somewhat undercut by an onscreen reference to the “Weyland Corporation” (groan). This is immediately destroyed by a cringe-inducing “family discussion” between the Karl Urban Experience and the Kid (Who Can’t Handle Line Reads). We soon also meet our other tropes: the Foreigner, the Black Guy, the Woman, the Expendable Roughnecks, and the William Forsythe (played in this case by the actual William Forsythe).

This is an Alien rip-off: it gets graded on its kills. The first is well-done: the set-up is obvious but the timing isn’t, nor was the location of the creature. We also aren’t shown anything. Spielberg did that in Jaws because Bruce didn’t work; later filmmakers do it because they can’t afford the effects shots. Still, if we learned anything from the Star Wars prequels it’s that more effects aren’t an unalloyed good. I shudder at the thought of what the Empire Strikes Back would have looked like with 2000s-era effects technology.

Now it’s raining. And still with too much green. Someone saw the Matrix and thought that those were the elements that made it kick ass. The Foreigner eats it next. Again, the kill is suspenseful. We know it’s going to happen but the film pauses. It shows more of the creature but waits on the big reveal. And then, unfortunately, we’re back to the social drama crap aboard the rig. I never expected to write the phrase “the sleeping with the oil rig boss’s daughter plot was done better in Armageddon,” but there we are.

There are characters on screen. Were they introduced before? We’re going to call them Thin Guy With A Beard and Wise Older Fellow Who Probably Dies Soon. Oh God, WORDS. Why are they still talking? What the hell is going on? If the screen wasn’t tinted green I’d assume we’d switched to a different film.

SPOILER. Forsythe eats it. I feel cheated. He died like a sucker and now everyone left in the film is worthless and weak. How much time is left? Oh no: we’re only 36 minutes in. We’ve got an hour left and it’s only getting worse. In another part of the movie the Karl Urban Experience is having sex in the shower with another character. This goes on much longer than is strictly necessary, because it’s that kind of movie. It’s also not all that exploitative, because the people making this movie aren’t very good at making movies.

We now launch into the obligatory what’s-going-on-search-the-ship montage, set to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony for some reason. I see what they were going for, but it doesn’t work with the tight confines of an ostensible oil rig.

We’ve decided that Wise Older Fellow Who Probably Dies Soon (who has lived longer than expected) is actually Muldoon, though he has a modified speargun instead of an automatic shotgun. Now we have yet another heart-breaking (not actually) flashback to William Forsythe. I hope he’s getting paid for these. I’m not sure Muldoon is still in the same movie as everyone else. Pity. I’m liking his better, which seems to involve skulking around outside an oil rig with a weapon and murder in his eyes.

We’re back in the Other Movie. This thing is padded something fierce. Finally, at about the 55-minute mark, our suspicions as to why the creature wasn’t shown earlier are confirmed. Oh my. Looks like a Sleestak who wandered off the set of Land of the Lost. The Karl Urban Experience and the Thin Guy With A Beard are now leaving the comparative safety of the control room and descending into the bowels of the ship. Presumably, this is so they can be killed more easily. Suddenly our movies unite, as Muldoon finds the idiots and intones (I’m serious) “we’re being hunted.”

Continuing in this theme we have our “Clever girl” moment and the sad music plays. Not only did Muldoon fail to kill to the creature, but he failed to explain his plan. He’s a complete waste.

I should mention now, since I didn’t earlier, that The Kid is starring in a third, almost entirely separate movie. The only other character in that movie is some kind of Big Boss played by Art LaFleur who, like Forsythe, is way above this material. He only has two scenes. We haven’t seen either in some time and they’re clearly not on this rig. See above: padding. There are 25 minutes and…three characters left (the Girl, Karl Urban Experience and Thin Guy). That’s like eight minutes per character, unless the creature invades the third movie and attacks the Big Boss or the Kid. At least we’re down to two movies.

Karl Urban Experience has his big heroic fight scene and we’re down to two characters. We had a lot of boring staging and stalking before that. The camera work really is incompetent. The fire “effect” when our survivors finally burn the creature isn’t much better. The Girl survives and we fade out to the rescue chopper…

Oh God, the movie isn’t over. Why isn’t it over? Now we’re back on the third movie, and the Big Boss is going to find out what happened on his rig. He brought the Kid with him, because of course he did. After an unnecessarily long sequence we find out that Karl Urban Experience yet lives (of course), and Big Boss uses Muldoon’s weapon to kill the creature. Finally credits roll.

Excuse me, WTF?

See the B-movie metric for an explanation of this outcome.