Film studio The Asylum has always done its bottom-feeding from the deepest, darkest depths of the movie-world’s Mariana Trench. And while on one level it seems churlish to criticise its output – given its raison d’etre is to churn out wilfully, woefully cheap movies to cynically exploit cinematic and societal trends for a quick buck – that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Or is it? I can never really be sure if I loathe or absolutely bloody love The Asylum’s movies, expertly straddling – as they do – the fault-line between failed cinematic experiment and comedic masterpiece. And Titanic II  (what a title, by the way) is no exception.

The story, for what it’s worth – and by jove it isn’t worth much – concerns the startling discovery that huge chunks of ice are falling into the ocean from the Arctic shelf, causing tsunamis to launch icebergs across the Atlantic (at least there aren’t any Sharknados). This shocking discovery is made by Captain Maine (Bruce Davison, the movie’s only well-known face and talented actor) of the US Coastguard; his assistant, and literally ONE scientist. The sequence where the heroic trio flee to the safety of their helicopter across a perilous icescape as it cracks and tears around them looks like it was rendered on a half-broken Amiga 500 circa 1987, either that or on Babbage’s Difference Engine.

During their escape the poor scientist makes the trio a duo by plummeting to his death down a newly-opened CG chasm, and, honestly, Cliffhanger it ‘aint: it’s more like a death-scene from CITV’s Knightmare. You can almost hear Treaguard remark witheringly: ‘Ooooh, nasty’. It’s absolutely bloody hilarious, as all good deaths shouldn’t be in an ostensibly serious edge-of-your-seat disaster thriller. Now, as something of a handy psycho-barometer: if you find yourself laughing at the deaths in The Poseidon Adventure you’re probably a psychopath; if you don’t find yourself chuckling at the deaths in Titanic II then you’re probably a neolithic caveman who’s never seen a movie before. Even my 7-year-old lost his shit laughing at the incongruity of most of them.

Now, imagine what Titanic 2 would look like in real life: how obscenely grand and lavish its construction, its launch undoubtedly broadcast to the entire globe, and attended by hundreds of thousands of revellers and enthusiasts, including all of the most famous celebrities of the day. Now imagine it on a budget of fifty pence. Can you picture it? Are there about 25 people at the launch, all of whom are dressed like they were on their way to the Spar for a loaf of bread and some Freddos when someone forced them onboard a cruise-ship at gunpoint? Does the air around them ring out with the same identical chorus of royalty-free whooping and cheering sound effects, played endlessly over and over, again and again, like some torture-loop fresh from Guantanamo Bay? Does the ship’s captain look like the result of ordering Tom Green from Wish? And is he clearly wearing a uniform that’s at least 3 sizes too big for him to the point where he’s got a visible wizard’s sleeve? Is there equipment on the bridge next to him that looks like a vending machine that’s had things selotaped over it? My friend, then you’re clearly aboard The Asylum’s cut-price version of Titanic II.

Near the beginning of the movie we’re introduced to Amy Maine, a nurse aboard the doomed cruise-liner, and daughter of the coastguard Captain we met earlier. We’re also introduced to Dick Van Dyke’s actual grandson, Shane van Dyke, who swaggers onto the ship playing Titanic 2’s rich financier, Ian.

We’re supposed to believe old Ian is some sort of irresistible ladies’ man and millionaire playboy, despite the fact that he looks like a minor henchman from an 1980s action movie after a rough divorce, and his line delivery drips with all the charm and dynamism of Jeffrey Dahmer after demolishing an ounce of skunk. Of the four haggard, scantily-clad MILFs that form Van Dyke’s entourage, and hang on him like the reek from a recent fry-up, it later becomes evident that one of them is inexplicably in charge of passenger liaison and disaster control.

“Hey, what will we do if this bad boy starts sinking? Do we have someone in charge of calming people down and getting them to the lifeboats?”

“No, we didn’t officially fill that role, but I’m sure if the worst happens we’ll be able to count on one of the many chicks who fucks the guy who owns the boat. Christ, you worry too much.”

Van Dyke and Amy used to be an item, but as this segment of dialogue makes painfully clear, they were too badly written to survive as a couple:

“Your dad punched me in the mouth.”

“Can you blame him? You were joyriding in his boat at two in the morning.”

“Still a daddy’s girl I see?”

“Look who’s talking.”

The very same Van Dyke is responsible for the movie’s script and direction, so we know that the apple falls very far from the tree in this family – so far from the tree that it was probably launched by a tsunami.

As disaster inevitably strikes, and the ship is subjected to whooshes and impacts and explosions (which is not nearly as exciting on screen as this sentence fragment would suggest) we’re treated to a scream-track of a Faye Wray-style damsel losing her shit in an endless loop of terror, even when all we can see are men. People randomly trip and flail to their feet, because Van Dyke must’ve told them that that’s how people behave in a stampede, even though there are only ever about 5 extras on screen at any one time. I don’t know what the minimum requirement is for a stampede, but it’s probably more than five.

The movie is a beautiful hotch-potch of inanity and hilarity, something that’s especially evident when Amy and van Dyke embark on their perilous below-decks mission to save Amy’s nurse friend who’s been crushed beneath a vending machine, only for her to be killed by a door. There’s a daring dash up a ladder that’s very clearly been filmed at ground-level, with the actors crawling horizontally along the floor like Gollum. There’s the absolute bat-shit insanity of Captain Maine’s survival advice to his daughter, which I paraphrase here: “You won’t survive in a lifeboat. You need to get to the diving facility that’s on that ship for some daft fucking reason, put on some diving equipment and wait inside the sinking ship for the next tsunami and iceberg to hit. That’s the key to living through this!”

Then there’s the diving facility itself, which we know is a diving facility because there’s a paper A4 poster that says ‘TITANIC 2 DIVING FACILITY’ hanging on the wall next to a high-school gym locker.

The movie’s ending is bleaker even than the movie version of Stephen King’s The Mist, but nevertheless had me laughing all the way through the end credits. After dodging certain death with van Dyke, Amy finds herself in a rescue craft with van Dyke, desperately trying to resuscitate him as her father and his assistant look on with cold detachment.

Normally, there’s an unofficial rule of thumb in movies that the longer a character spends trying to bring another, dying character back from the brink, the greater the chance that the dying character is going to survive. Amy spends almost two and a half minutes – not a long time in the grand scheme of things, but a very long time on-screen – pressing down on van Dyke’s chest and giving him mouth-to-mouth, doing the same thing again and again, with no change in direction, urgency, tempo, camera angles or music. She just plods on and on with it for what feels like forever…

And then he dies…

And the end credits roll. And without another word being said, THAT’S THE FUCKING MOVIE.

I really hope they make a Titanic III.

*You can currently stream Titanic II on Amazon Prime*

Run-time: Mercifully short