Sylvester Stallone's Only Horror Movie Was A Disastrous Flop

Sylvester Stallone has seen it all in Hollywood. He's been arguably the biggest movie star in the world on the strength of knockout blockbusters like "Rocky," "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and "Cliffhanger," but he's also been clobbered by a number of ignominious box office flops. Still, no matter how many times Stallone's kissed canvas, he's been able to stagger back to his feet and keep moving forward. Even when he strings together a series of career-damaging stinkers in a row, there's always a comeback movie in the offing.

Even though I've long known to never count Stallone, there have been times when I wondered if he was hurtling toward commercial, if not artistic, irrelevance. The 1990s were a particularly dark period for him. He lumbered into the decade with the underwhelming "Rocky V," and a pair of box office bombs in "Oscar" and "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" (which Arnold Schwarzenegger tricked into making) before regaining his footing in 1993 with "Cliffhanger" and "Demolition Man." But his star slowly began to diminish again. Aside from voicing Corporal Weaver in the Dreamworks Animation hit "Antz," he struggled through box office disappointments like "Daylight" and "Copland."

Stallone felt like something had to change, so, seeing that the horror genre was experiencing a resurgence, he signed on for the slasher flick "D-Tox" from "I Know What You Did Last Summer" director Jim Gillespie. Stallone was surrounded by an impressive cast that included Charles S. Dutton, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Berenger, Kris Kristofferson, Stephen Lang, and Robert Patrick, and Universal gave it a healthy $55 million budget. "D-Tox" wasn't an ambitious movie; it was a mainstream chiller that was meant to capitalize on a thriving genre. It turned out to be a disaster.

Jake Malloy, an FBI agent on the hunt for a serial killer who preys on cops. While investigating the murder of his former partner at the victim's home, Malloy receives a call from his home. It's the killer. He informs Malloy that he once tracked him when he was in his sex-worker-murdering phase. None too pleased about this, the killer murders Malloy's girlfriend. This sends the agent into an alcoholic spiral, which leads a friend to check him into a detox facility that specifically treats cops in the throes of addiction. The facility is in a remote location in Wyoming, and, since it's winter, snow-ins are common. It'd be a bad place to get trapped if, y'know, there happened to be a serial killer stalking the premises.

As patients and employees are picked off one by one in fairly grisly ways, the recovering-addict cops scramble to identify a prime suspect. Narratively, it's a standard-issue whodunnit loaded with red herrings. It's just wholly unengrossing. The characters aren't interesting, and it all feels stitched together. That's because it was.

In a 2006 Q&A at Ain't It Cool News, Stallone said the trouble with "D-Tox" started when the original producer quit the picture. This led to a tense shoot where the studio was concerned with the film's rising budget. No one was happy with the first cut of the film, so they did a reshoot, which, according to Stallone, "tested okay" (Ron Howard was also involved in post-production). Universal nevertheless opted to shelve the movie, and, after watching Stallone bomb out with "Get Carter" and "Driven," dumped it to DVD in 2002.

Stallone was box office poison for four years, but he bounced back with "Rocky Balboa" in 2006. There's no quit in the Italian Stallion.