Director – Nick Lyon, Screenplay – Jacob Cooney & Jason White, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Taylor James Randall, Music – Christopher Cano, Mikel Shane Prather & Chris Ridenhour, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Makeup Effects – Monique Paredes, Production Design – Larae Wilson. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Jamie Bamber (Professor Hal Cochran), Keesha Sharp (Captain Celeste Rhodes), Lydia Hearst (Idina Bess), Annalynne McCord (Mia Stone), Joseph Gatt (Brian Andrews), Derek Yates (Jackson Stone), Jhey Castles (Julie McInnoy), Michael Chen (Parker), Kendall Chappell (Regina), Al Coronel (Hector)
Plot
The Titanic III, a replica of the Titanic, sets sail under Captain Celeste Rhodes. Among the passengers are celebrity livestreamers Jackson and Mia Stone and Professor Hal Cochran, who is selling a selection of artefacts salvaged from the wreck of the original Titanic. Idina Bess, the great-granddaughter of the Titanic’s captain, smuggles aboard in a suitcase and then conducts an occult ceremony. As the ship nears the site of the original sinking, her ceremony raises the ghosts of those who died on board. The ghosts now come to seek revenge on the living for the exploitation of their name by the selling of their personal effects.
The Asylum is a low-budget US production company that has had a very prolific output of films since the mid-2000s, consisting of Mockbusters, films with titles intended to resemble big-budget hits that have just come out, Gonzo Killer Shark movies – most notedly with the whole phenomenon of Sharknado (2013), along with assorted monster and disaster movies.
The Asylum had previously made Titanic II (2010), which features a similar plot where a replica of the Titanic sets sail. Titanic 666 can be seen to be a sequel of sorts in that it features another replica ship called Titanic III. On the other hand, Titanic II was just a regular Asylum disaster movie where the ship is endangered by an iceberg released by Global Warming, whereas here the threat is Supernatural Retribution from the ghosts of the Titanic’s dead. The title also has lineage to The Asylum’s Flight 666 (2018) about vengeful ghosts appearing aboard a plane flight.
Titanic 666 was made to be released on the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. The opening sections conduct a passable reconstruction of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) before the equivalent of Kate Winslet clinging to the wreckage is interrupted by a ghost emerged from the deep. The actual reconstructions of the Titanic look quite good. The Asylum’s in-house effects team are on top form and create some excellent shots of the ship cruising at sea. Moreover, the crew have gone to shoot on board the Queen Mary, the now retired Transatlantic cruise liner that is berthed in Long Beach, California as a tourist attraction (where it incidentally has gained a reputation as one of the most haunted locales in the US). This gives the film a much more expansive and realistic feel of being aboard a large ship of this era than you would have otherwise expected.
The Titanic III prepares to set sail – some quite impressive effects from The Asylum’s in-house team
There is an above-average cast for once in an Asylum film. Jamie Bamber, the British actor best known as Captain Apollo in tv’s Battlestar Galactica (2003-9), has a good deal of fun playing a bad guy role as a dubious shyster. Annalynne McCord, an actress who never quite became the name she should have done, has a great deal of fun playing a self-absorbed social media influencer. Joseph Gatt, a bald-headed actor who has been doing time in a number of B movie roles, is not too bad as the security enforcer.
On the other hand, some of the other names in the cast leave raised eyebrows. Some of these leave you wondering how their respective characters would have managed to be employed crewing a major liner like this – Keesha Sharp looks completely unlike a captain and more as though she were an off-duty R&B singer, while Michael Chen comes with scruffy long, almost certainly non-regulation hair.
The film creates a reasonable build up. On the other hand, it starts to become far less interesting once the ghosts are released. When a film has ‘titanic’ in the title, what you want to be watching is a ship sinking and lots of disaster effects. The ship does sink but here the above average effects provided through the rest of the film befall typical Asylum corner-cutting. The film tries to step around the need to provide any sinking of the ship by instead focusing on the ghosts come to claim supernatural retribution for people stealing their china and jewellery instead of any big disaster movie effects, but this seem an underwhelming delivery in comparison to the mass destruction you expect.
Director Nick Lyon has made a number of other low-budget genre films, including the likes of Grendel (2007), Species: The Awakening (2007), Annihilation Earth (2009), Zombie Apocalypse (2011), Rise of the Zombies (2012), Foreclosed (2013), Bermuda Tentacles (2014), Hercules Reborn (2014), Stormageddon (2015), They Found Hell (2015), Earthtastrophe (2016), Isle of the Dead (2016) and Shockwave (2017) and Continental Split (2024).
