Oh Asylum, you so crazy. Seriously, I love these guys. Love them like a fat kid loves cake. Seems like you just can’t keep them down–no matter how cheap, cheesy, or purely lunatic their newest idea happens to be, the next thing you know they’re coming out with something bigger and even more insane than their last. And this time, The Asylum finds the bottom of the barrel and breaks out the picks and shovels with their newest release–2010: Moby Dick, a copy of which they sent out.

2010: Moby Dick is pretty much what it says on the box–a very, very heavily adapted version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, except this time, Captain Ahab is a navy man with a high-tech ultrasubmarine who’s going after a prehistoric whale-monster that just happens to be white. Now, Captain Ahab, armed with the might of the USS Pequod, and a commandeered whale researcher, is out for payback against the whale that’s eluded him for years. But not only will Ahab be hunting the whale, he’ll be hunted himself by the United States Navy.

I have to admit, Barry Bostwick, who will probably only be remembered for his performance as the daffy Mayor on Spin City, but he does an unsettlingly good job here as Captain Ahab. And Renee O’Connor, who will be forever remembered as Xena’s partner on Xena: Warrior Princess, also does a solid job here as a marine biologist railroaded into helping Ahab with his hunt.

Sure, this is just another one of The Asylum’s big monster movies that will likely wind up on SyFy before too much longer (and I still hate that name–SyFy. It’s phonetically accurate, sure, but the spelling is ludicrous to say the least) with a veneer of literary quality to shake things up a bit, but still. The end result is surprisingly watchable, even if at its base the idea couldn’t be much more ludicrous.

The literati among us is no doubt having an embolism, and Melville himself is likely spinning in his grave so fast that if we wrapped his coffin in copper wire he’d generate an electrical current, but once again, The Asylum has brought its unique brand of low-budget watchability with a huge emphasis on action to this its latest knockoff.

Of course, some parts will be ludicrous–submarines using nuclear missiles to fight big whales is beyond the pale–but watching a giant whale breach water to swallow a helicopter is a whole new level of ludicrous, and you’ll see that here.

2010: Moby Dick isn’t a bad movie, and that’s a huge step for The Asylum. Short on sense but long on action, it’s the kind of movie a lot of people will like, and there are plenty of great performances to go around.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands 2010: Moby Dick a score that surprises even itself–a seven out of ten. It’s irrational beyond all belief and plausibility, but it’s not a half-bad action movie in its own right.