Credit: Dangerous Minds / Tubi

As with everything else in the history of pop culture, The Simpsons did it first. The “It” in this case is the idea of the “Titanic horror sequel”.

The whole Roger Corman’s Titanic bit is a typically spectacular gag where, clearly, a few writers casually bandied about a truly brilliant joke, then crowbarred it into an episode with nothing to connect it to the main story, more or less on a whim. For those of you who didn’t know, it’s all of ten seconds at the most and features a Titanic crashing into an iceberg (with a car crash sound effect no less), sinking in a flash, before a zombified, monstrous version of the ship rises from the deep to attack a couple escaping on a lifeboat.

It’s a brilliant bit of writing. One that, typically, foreshadowed a real-life event that the writers could never have seen coming at the time. Because after all, why would they? James Cameron’s masterful weepie Titanic had only been released the year before the episode featuring the Corman version aired. In what sort of world would a version of the story featuring ghosts and the paranormal be told?! Well, the version of the Earth we saw in 2022 – 24 years after the airing of that Simpsons episode.

What’s more, it wasn’t even the first version of a “sequel” to Cameron’s classic we got. There have, in fact, been two movies released as very thinly veiled continuations of his classic story, the first coming in 2010 with a title that must have taken some serious chutzpah to carry through to release. After all, the barefaced cheek of naming a film Titanic II is so spectacular that it almost deserves some begrudging respect, especially when you account for how they got away with it.

After all, it’s not called Titanic II because it continues Cameron’s story, it’s called that because it’s about a boat called Titanic II. Something I’m sure the studio’s lawyers must have had to explain to a whole lot of people.

What happens in these ‘Titanic’ sequels?

Considering these films were both made by The Asylum, home of the Transmorphers, Iron Hero and the Avengers Grimm franchises, I’m sure those lawyers weren’t phased even by the kind of lawyers that James Cameron could send after them. Titanic II was released, and it’s not offensively bad, more boring than anything else – another ship called Titanic II is built to mark the centenary of the original voyage, but a series of disasters caused by global warming causes the ship to sink on its maiden voyage.

That’s not the really silly one. The jewel in the bad movie crown here is Titanic 666. In it, a second attempt is made to replicate the original trip. You’d think they’d have learned after the last two, but no. However, rather than an iceberg or a gigantic tsunami filled with icebergs (maybe Titanic II is a good movie after all?), this hilariously awful picture features a satanic ritual happening deep in the bowels of the ship that causes everything to go horrifically wrong.

To say anymore would be to ruin your next bad movie night, and we wouldn’t want to do that. It’s got everything you could possibly want. Laughably hammy acting. Spectacularly bad CGI. Some of the funniest attempts at scares you could ever ask for, and in a way that only gets more gross the more you think about it, actors playing actual people who died on the original Titanic back in 1912. Probably best not to think about it too much in that case.

Lord knows those Simpsons writers probably spent more time thinking of Roger Corman’s Titanic than the folks behind Titanic 666.