Hoopla's Not Recommended: I watched them, so you don't have to!

I love watching obscure movies, and even more than that, discovering that Hoopla's catalog is nothing like what you'll find on most mainstream streaming services.

After downloading the app and browsing the movie collections, I found some that caught my interest because the descriptions sounded so awful that they had the potential to be unintentionally hilarious. Here are my quick reviews of the following movies: Titanic 2 and The Jurassic Games.

Titanic II

First off, there's only so many things a movie called Titanic II can be about. The story follows a modern luxury cruise ship named after the original Titanic, setting sail on the 100th anniversary of the infamous disaster. As anyone could probably predict, catastrophe strikes when a tsunami somehow launches an iceberg into the ship. Despite all of our modern technology, the vessel sinks anyway, and nearly everyone dies. In fact, it appears there is only ONE survivor, which is honestly a little ridiculous.

Nepotism is definitely at play here. The movie is produced, directed, written by, and stars one man, who—unsurprisingly—also plays the heroic lead. For anyone curious, he's also Dick Van Dyke's grandson.

This direct-to-DVD disaster film is just that, a disaster. It actually has the audacity to play its premise completely straight. It is not an official sequel to James Cameron's 1997 masterpiece, but it certainly hopes you might be confused enough to rent it anyway.

I suppose you have to respect the sheer shamelessness of making a movie like this. Characters try to outrun rushing water on foot, random people die in unexpectedly gruesome ways that clash with the movie's attempted romance and heroics, and the entire thing feels clunky from beginning to end. The CGI ship is especially rough, resembling an early-'90s rendering of the RMS Queen Mary rather than a modern luxury liner inspired by the Titanic.

The set design doesn't help either. You're supposed to believe you're aboard a multi-billion-dollar, state-of-the-art cruise ship, but the interiors were very clearly filmed inside an ordinary hotel and shopping mall. You can practically spot the illuminated exit signs in the background.

Titanic II is a masterclass in making a terrible movie without realizing you're making a terrible movie. It's too dull to work as a disaster thriller and not outrageous enough to become an entertaining comedy. Between the endless green-screen effects, plot holes, baffling decisions, and the fact that virtually everyone still dies despite a century of technological advancement, it's less spectacular than it is simply disappointing.

The Jurassic Games

If you hear the title The Jurassic Games and immediately imagine a low-budget mashup of Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, and The Running Man... you're exactly right!

In a dystopian near future, ten death-row inmates are forced to compete in a televised virtual reality game show. The objective? Survive deadly environments, each other, and a whole lot of hungry dinosaurs. If you die in VR, you're given a lethal injection in the real world. The last contestant standing receives a full pardon and their freedom.

It's absolute B-movie gold. The movie moves at such a frantic pace that it barely pauses for story or character development before throwing another CGI dinosaur at the contestants. It almost feels like someone adapted a budget video game into a feature-length film.

I will say that the host of the show is genuinely entertaining. He perfectly captures the smug, ratings-obsessed television personality that a movie like this needs, and he's easily the most memorable character.

Unfortunately, everything else is fairly forgettable. The characters are little more than stereotypes with predictable backstories, and the movie only half-commits to its ridiculous premise. Instead of embracing nonstop dinosaur mayhem, it repeatedly slows down to focus on inmate-on-inmate drama that isn't nearly as entertaining. Honestly, the movie would have been better served by simply throwing more dinosaurs at everyone.

The writing is also painfully clunky. It gallops past logic and exposition, relying on awkward dialogue and familiar tropes that every movie it's borrowing from has already done much better.

Overall, The Jurassic Games is just a little too restrained to earn true "so bad it's good" status. The fact that it somehow received a sequel in 2025 only makes the whole thing even more baffling.