2010: Moby Dick

I have no idea HOW they got the cast to do this hokum. It was frakking unbelievably awful.

I have no idea how they got the cast to sign on, I have no idea. Blackmail? Threats of torture? Kidnapping? But they were just wasted. They looked like they couldn't believe they had been forced to do such awful drivel.

What killed it was the story. The original was a wonderful novel. It has been done quite well at least three times before, with Gregory Peck, Patrick Stewart or Jack Aranson as Ahab. Orson Welles made a short of it. A new version is coming out with William Hurt as Ahab, and I look forward to it. Even if the script had been decent, I think Barry Bostwick would have been out of his league playing Ahab.

The special effects aren't that bad, but it takes so little to do that these days. What was AWFUL was how they used them. The whale looks to be the size of an island, simply bigger than any animal has ever been found to be.

I could go on and on and on. The only pleasure from it was like that of watching an airplane about to crash. You know it's a disaster in progress and it will be famously horrible.

Other than Renee O'Connor in a bikini top, this movie has no redeeming qualities. The entire cast and crew throw all their SAG cards into one pile, tie Barry Bostwick and the director to a stake, and burn the whole lot. I know this kind of movie requires a suspension of disbelief, but this stuff will give you brain cancer !! Other than the first 10 minutes where Renee is parading the bikini top, this movie should be avoided !! How does Bostwick get work?? He has pics of movies execs in the hot tub with some underage action?? And they give Melville a nod as contributing writer. Btw, he has returned from the dead, and he looks mighty mad !!

I am just glad that Herman Melville is not alive to see what they have done to his immortal tale of Ahab and his White Whale. I thought the film went over the top when they were using names like Ahab and Moby Dick, but when they added the character names of Starbuck, Queg Qheg, what really got me was the name of the submarine, U.S. S. Pequod, now that is just a little much. I am just glad that Herman Melville has been dead for over 100 years or he may come back from the grave and let us know what he thinks. At least they didn't have a character named Ishmael.

Still, as bad as that is, I find the film compelling, maybe that's because I have such a craving for a stupid horror film. It's worth a watch if you don't expect too much from the film.

Lets make make something clear, this is low budget. Whats worse is that any technical aspect that could possibly be wrong, IS wrong. A low budget is no excuse for not doing some basic research on the internet before you being production, its free after all.

We have navy officers wearing army field uniforms, we have have a one legged submarine captain and and helicopter attacking a submerged nuclear submarine with a machine gun, and doing enough damage to make the 400feet sub shake like it was being depth charged!

All the special effects and animations looks like they transfered in from the eighties and and most of the sets are awful as well. The ultramodern submarine looks like a run down Russian factory on the inside, and the instrumentation seems borrowed from a lesser Sci-Fi production.

So why did I still give it a 4? Well I managed to sit through the movie. I'll admit that I was desperately bored, but still. The acting is not as horrible as you might expect, but still far from anything memorable. And the basic story is not hopeless either, with a large studio this might have become an OK film on par with godzilla or king kong. However any similarities with the original book are nowhere to be seen, besides the big whale and the obsessed captain that is.

The 4 I gave it is being generous, but I have seen movies that are worse, and still scored higher on IMDb.

At this point in time, Asylum movies are among the worst in all of creation. You don't get to be this bad without effort.

Anyone watching this movie in the hopes that it will be anything more than a cheap sucker-punch at the classic novel Moby Dick will be disappointed in the worst way. If you were expecting a remotely plausible story with reasonably capable actors and even some worthwhile special effects, then you should have never watched a movie made by Asylum. You are very behind on the times if you don't know that Asylum doesn't do that sort of thing.

It is soul-crushingly bad. It's like watching despair. So much so that I'm beginning to suspect that they are doing it on purpose. Nothing else could possibly explain how they can relentlessly churn out terrible movie after terrible movie, with absolutely no shame. I'm truly starting to believe that Asylum is in fact dedicated to the less-than-noble cause of making their mark as the worst movie making company in history. All of the things that a good movie needs will never be found in an Asylum motion picture. They need a trophy for epic failure in movie making.

But it's not all bad. Asylum is definitely good at one thing: Making movies so bad that they mysteriously 180-themselves into something good. This movie didn't really succeed at that, but it did have some very entertaining moments. The "special effects" are notably radical; certain scenes with the whale literally caused me to slip out of my chair laughing, and the look on the doctor's face nearly caused me to have a stroke (watch it and you'll see what I mean). For that reason alone I'm giving the movie a 2 instead of a 1.