Seriously, I’m convinced that they’re trying to drive me nuts. Every time I open an envelope from The Asylum–as I did today when they sent me a copy of, of all things, Titanic II, for review–I have no idea what lump of insanity will spill out.

Will they send me some Asylumized blockbuster?  Something original?  Or something just so purely lunatic it defies all description?

Ironically, Titanic II is almost exactly the same thing as its predecessor, just set in the future.  A hundred years after the original Titanic’s doomed voyage, the Titanic II is christened and set out onto the water.  And it’s a bit of a problem from the word go, as we discover lots of corners were cut to get it out in time.  When a tsunami breaks loose a chunk of ice and puts it in Titanic II’s path, history will repeat itself.  Who will survive this time?  We’ll find out!

And it really is just a low budget version of the original Titanic–while they’ve made plans for the things that the original faced, they discover that they didn’t plan at all for a whole host of new problems, so basically, they’re going to be in the exact same spot they were in the first time, just under an utterly different set of conditions.

But this isn’t actually to denigrate Titanic II, because for a low-budget ripoff, they’ll do a pretty good job of it.  The end result is as exciting a disaster movie as The Asylum can generate, and The Asylum has done some really nice disaster flicks in their day. Give credit where credit is due, they know how to milk a scene for suspense and thrills, and they’ll do that here.

So to answer the question above, it’ll be an Asylumized knockoff of sorts, it’ll be at least a bit of a ripoff and it’ll be a chunk of sheer raw insanity.  But give them credit, they knew how to make this right, and so they did.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Titanic II a six out of ten–it may be unoriginal, but it’s certainly not dull.  And at the end of the day, that’s why we watch movies.