Like most people, I spent my youth hanging out in the aisles of video rental places like Hollywood and Blockbuster. One day, I came across a shelf that had VHS and DVD copies of Eye See You starring Sylvester Stallone and wondered “How did I miss this?”
I still read Entertainment Weekly, before the writers got too pious and pompous about themselves. I had never heard of it. I had also been reading the now-defunct Movieline, which was like EW would’ve been like if the writers didn’t take themselves too seriously. Glancing through some old copies I had, I came across a small blurb in 1999 mentioning that a movie, D-Tox, had been reportedly shelved by had then cost Universal Pictures $60 million. Insiders were saying it was the most expensive movie to be shelved at the time.
Following a backlash against horrors and thrillers in the late 1980s, movies about serial killers and maniacs got a rebirth following the surprise success of The Silence of the Lambs followed a few years later by Se7en. Suddenly, everyone was churning out dark thrillers and horrors with big names. Denzel Washington, who had turned down Se7en, did Fallen and The Bone Collector. Scream had exploded showing that horror can work if made correctly.
This followed by a bunch of imitators (Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer) but there was problems on the horizon. The April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., changed Hollywood on a dime. (Look at what happened to Scream 3.) Movies with violent and gore had taken a backseat for lighter movies. Even the Quentin Tarantino imitators like Troy Duffy found themselves unable to get their movies made.
Eye See You, or D-Tox, began as an obscure short novel written by true-crime journalist Howard Swindle, who is credited as the screenwriter, that was optioned for a movie adaptation. However, Swindle’s novel was about a Dallas police officer who finds himself in an alcohol rehab clinic tracking a killer murdering other patients and leaving behind indications of the 12-step program.
The movie is way different. The protagonist is now FBI Agent Jake Malloy (Stallone) who is tracking a killer of police officers. At the start of the movie, he is planning on proposing to his girlfriend, Mary (Dina Meyer), when his former partner is murdered. At the crime scene, he gets a phone call from the killer, using a voice-changing machine to let Malloy know the killer is at his house. Malloy tries to call Mary but it’s too late and when he returns home, he discovers she’s been killed too.
Yet, the authorities believe they have discovered where the killer is and track him to an industrial area where Malloy thinks he spots him but they lose him in the search. Months later, Malloy has moved out of the house and spends his days sitting in a bar drinking. His friend/colleague, Chuck Hendricks (Charles S. Dutton), encourages him to attend a rehab operated by Dr. John Mitchell (Kris Kristofferson), a former cop turned rehab counselor.
But Malloy is uninterested and breaks into his former home, slits his wrists in a suicide attempt, and waits to die. More time passes as Malloy has recovered but still drinking and Hendricks is driving him to the clinic located out in the Wyoming wilderness during the middle of winter. Mitchell’s clinic is an abandoned government psychiatric facility that started out as a strategic command post during the Cold War. The isolation and tone of the building set during the brutal harsh winter does set a great tone for a thriller/horror.
Yet, the movie quickly falls into a bunch of cliches as the other patients are law enforcement who all seem part of central casting. Jaworski (Jeffrey Wright) is a narcotics cop who also attempted suicide but tried to shoot his brains out but shot through his cheek and has a scarred mouth. Peter Noah (Robert Patrick) is the manly bravado SWAT cop. Willie Jones (Courtney B. Vance) is a homicide detective who found religion and became a born-again Christian. McKenzie (Robert Prosky) is an elderly former officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who witnessed his partner’s murder. And Frank Slater (Christopher Fulford) is a cynical British cop, who is very friendly to Malloy upon his arrival.
The facility operates on a skeleton crew that consists of Hank (Tom Berenger) as the maintenance technician, an assistant, Jack Bennett (Stephen Lang), who has a grouchy cynical demeanor which means he’s the initial red herring, and Jenny Munroe (Polly Walker), as the medical psychiatrist and nurse. Like most thrillers dating back to Agatha Christie, it sets up a group of people who may or may not be potential victims or killers. In some ways, it works but there’s too many characters to really get to know them well. They just pop up on screen to say a few lines during their scenes.
This was filmed between Wright’s breakthrough role in Basquiat and his more A-list roles began in the 2000s and you can see how talented he is. Jaworski may be a cardboard character but Wright gives him some personality and panache. Sean Patrick Flannery appears in a few scenes as a young cop who is suffering PTSD following a massacre at an elementary school. (Yeah, I can see one of the reason this movie was shelved.) Flannery’s role as Conner is so crucial to the movie it was probably hard to rework it or refilm it as Conner soon dies in an apparent suicide.
Then, another patient appears to have killed themselves by hanging. But only after an obvious murder do all the other patients and staff begin to suspect that they have a killer in the midst. This does have the paranoia of The Thing, which might have been what writer Swindle and director Jim Gillespie was going for. Gillespie filmed this as a follow-up to I Know What You Did Last Summer. And seeing Stallone in a different role as more of a struggling detective rather than an ass-kicking action hero is a change of pace.
Stallone was also coming off Copland, which got mostly good reviews for its different approach. But Stallone would say while initially he liked the reception he got from the movie, he feels it left others with the impression his time as an A-lister was over as he was going to do more “serious dramas.” James Mangold, the writer/director of that movie echoed Stallone’s sentiments saying the casting overshadowed the overall movie. While I like Copland and his performances harkens back to earlier roles in Rocky and First Blood where his character was more realistic, I think people were expecting a full-on acting thriller. Aside from a shoot-out at the end, it’s more of a tense cop drama with a big name cast that included Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel and also Patrick.
Stallone said of the movie that the initial producer left the production and it got the image of damaged goods. “By the time we ended filming there was trouble brewing on the set because of overages and creative concerns between the director and the studio,” he told Ain’t It Cool News in 2006. “The studio let it sit on the shelf for many months and after over a year it was decided to do a re-shoot. We screened it, it tested okay, Ron Howard was involved with overseeing some of the post-production… but the movie had the smell of death about it. Actually, if you looked up, you could see celluloid buzzards circling as we lay there dying on the distributor’s floor.”
Howard’s father, Rance, has a small role in the movie. It might explain how he became attached to the movie. It had a limited release in September of 2002 by DEJ Productions, probably to fulfill a contractual obligation for a theatrical release. It had been released theatrically in the United Kingdom in the winter of that year as D-Tox. Overall, the movie made $6.4 million off its budget. It wasn’t nearly as bad as The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which suffered similar problems and a lackluster release.
Yet, a violent movie with an impressive cast, released in the aftermath of both Columbine and 9/11 would never really be as successful. I feel a lot of cuts and edits were made to tone down the violence, but it’s still gruesome. It wasn’t until the Saw and Hostel movies made people were willing to sit through graphically violent movies. You can tell the movie is choppy at times. Only 96 minutes with edits, I feels like it was probably longer with better character developments before demands were made to make it more violent. Gillespie had the same issues on Summer.
Reportedly, the ending was changed to make the killer’s death more heroic and macho for Stallone. (A similar scene of Stallone roughing up some thugs who take a pregnant woman’s seat on a bus was reportedly added in The Specialist.) Critics weren’t kind to it as it has a 17 percent aggregate on Rotten Tomatoes. Online public comments are more favorable but echo feelings it has a weak script (which is does) and plot holes (which is also does). The problem is the killer’s identity can be guessed within two minutes of anyone who’s seen these movies. And the killer’s motive is just outrageous.
Thankfully, Stallone was able to rebound following a comedic villain role in Spy Kid 3: Game Over, which was a box office hit despite mixed to bad reviews. He hit the reality-TV market with The Contender, which revived in the Rocky franchise with the 2006 critical and commercial hit Rocky Balboa. And Stallone has had a steady career, despite highs and lows, since then with The Expendables franchise, his Oscar-nominated Golden Globe-winning role in Creed, and appearing in both the MCU and DCEU with roles in the last two Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad.
It’s not an entirely bad movie. I feel that if it had a smaller-scale cast that it could have been a good exploitative B-movie slasher. But when you cast a lot of big names in a movie like this just to have them picked off one by one, like Mars Attacks!, a lot of people won’t buy tickets. This is the type of movie you watch on a late night or on a rainy cold afternoon. There are a lot of better movies and there’s a lot worse.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 