2010: Moby Dick is an Asylum film. If you're a connoisseur of bad cinema, that's probably all I need to tell you. Asylum are the folks behind Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus and the atrocious Titanic 2. They are unrepentant makers of B movies, the kind you might mistakenly pick up if you're drunk at a Blockbuster ("Aw, man, Transmorphers? What was I thinking?").

I've watched a ton of Asylum's movies (many of them on fast-forward or by skipping through the expository chunks), and I have to say: 2010: Moby Dick is one of their better outings. That still doesn't make it great or even good, though. It's a retelling of Moby Dick as a modern-day monster movie. Besides Bostwick as Ahab, there are virtually no actors you'll recognize here. Renée O'Connor stars as the Ishmael analog ("Call me Michelle," she says as she appears on screen, and you immediately know it's gonna be that kind of movie) and a bunch of no-names are cast as Starbuck and Queequeg and others.

Ahab pilots an ebony-black submarine of his own devising, The Pequod, to hunt down the enormous white whale that injured him years before. Along the way, significant slabs of exposition are slaughtered and occasional lines from Melville's book are dragged in against their will to be demeaned by working-class movie actors. The computer effects are terrible, and you often have no idea how a particular action is taking place. (How does a whale the size of the Chrysler Building shimmy into shallow waters and then roll around an island? How do soldiers manage to shoot at a whole from a beach? How does something moving that fast manage to take five minutes to cross the final 100 meters before collision?)

All of which goes to say: It's perfect distracted holiday viewing. Watch it while you're drunkenly wrapping presents. Throw it on at a holiday party. It's really terrible; I love it in the special way you can only love a particularly bad movie, and I can't wait until the inevitable sequel comes out.