The closest thing to a nautical movie in the theaters this season, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, doesn’t sound like it is necessarily worth the price of a ticket. Manohla Dargis begins her review in this morning’s NY Times as follows: “Not long before the children’s movie “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” sets sail, you might find yourself hoping for a nor’easter to come and blow this latest and perhaps last installment in the screen version of C.S. Lewis’s series, far, far away.”   Fortunately a straight to DVD remake of Moby Dick could just possibly be a new camp classic, at least if you believe the review by Monkey Fist.

In September we posted about a “re-imagining” of Moby Dick featuring dragons instead of whales.   It stars Danny Glover. How bad could it be?  (Pretty bad, we suspect.)  Now  The Asylum, an indie studio, has released “2010: Moby Dick” starring Barry Bostwick as the  mad captain Ahab in command of the submarine, USS Pequod, going after the great whale.  But not just any great whale.  Last summer, scientists found the fossilized remains of an ancient whale with huge, fearsome teeth, which they have dubbed Leviathan melvillei, in honor of Herman Melville.   So instead of a just any sperm whale, the 2010 Moby Dick is Melville’s Leviathan.  Renne O’Connor, of Xena fame,  is featured as the obligatory blonde.

The movie went straight to DVD.   And the reviews were not always kind:

Barry Bostwick chews so much scenery as Captain Ahab I’d be shocked to hear he wasn’t literally gnawing on the sets in between takes to help stay in character. Bostwick is so bombastically deadpan I spent much of the movie trying to figure out if he was unaware that he was in a campy b-monster movie version of Melville’s literary classic, thus making his pompous performance, sometimes delivering dialogue direct from the novel, all the more campier because of how increasingly preposterous the circumstances of the film are, or if he in on the joke the whole time and realized that playing the role to the hilt while keeping a straight face was precisely what a b-movie of this nature called for.

Actually this movie is sufficiently obscure so that reviews are hard to find.  Then, lo and behold, came a review from a wholly unexpected quarter.  Monkey Fist, compiler of gCaptain’s blog’s Maritime Monday and the proprietress of Adventures of the Blackgang, posted the following on 2010: Moby Dick:

I had the glorious privilege of seeing this yesterday.  I cannot urge you strongly enough… Go today to wherever you buy your dvds and grab a copy.  It’s BRILLIANT. Invite over a handful of similarly obnoxious friends and give it the MST3k treatment.  Makes a great stocking stuffer! Settle in with some Starbucks and enjoy the ride. -mf

So perhaps this is the straight to DVD must-see movie of the season.  The trailer below may give you a feel for the movie.