Sylvester Stallone has done it all. He’s earned multiple Oscar nominations for a franchise he created himself, and he’s headlined blockbuster action movies for decades. He directed the sequel to Saturday Night Fever. He’s been one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Heck, he even did a porno once.

And yes, although most people don’t know about it, Sylvester Stallone has also starred in one horror movie. Only one.

What’s more, unlike the many mainstream actors who appear in a couple horror movies early in their career and then move on from the genre – see: Leonardo DiCaprio (Critters 3), Tom Hanks (He Knows You’re Alone) and Jennifer Aniston (Leprechaun) – Stallone’s horror movie was made decades after the actor became a celebrity. And STILL most people don’t know about it.

The movie is a slasher called Eye See You (a.k.a. The Outpost, a.k.a. D-Tox), which was shot in the late 1990s, shelved, re-edited, and then eventually dumped into the straight to video market in 2002. As you can imagine, with a pedigree like that, it’s not exactly a masterpiece. But it’s also hardly the worst movie Stallone ever made.

Eye See You stars Stallone as F.B.I. agent Jake Malloy, who at the start of the film is hunting a serial killer who only kills police officers. When the killer murders one of Malloy’s personal friends, it’s actually just a trick to lure him away from his home, so the slasher can murder Malloy’s girlfriend, Mary (Dina Meyer).

With Mary murdered, and the killer seemingly dead after a shootout and foot chase, Eye See You cuts to three months later. Malloy has become an alcoholic, and his best friend and former superior officer Hendricks (Charles S. Dutton) tries to reach out to him.

At this point, Hendricks makes the bizarre mistake of telling a depressed alcoholic who orders more drinks by telling the bartender to “Kill me again,” that he should “act like a damn man” and “stop pissing Mary’s memory one sorry-ass day at a time.” He puts a gun on the table and dares Malloy to kill himself in the middle of a tavern, and when Malloy tries to take him up on the offer Hendricks leaves… because clearly Malloy is not a danger to himself and others and doesn’t need a friend right now.

Malloy, rather predictably, tries to kill himself, and the movie cuts again to a later date. Hendricks and Malloy are now in Wyoming, heading to an isolated detox center for cops with substance abuse problems. It’s a former military bunker that was turned into a mental asylum, which makes it look more like the setting of a horror movie than the kind of place any reasonable person would expect to find a new and positive perspective on life.

The rest of Eye See You takes place predominantly at this facility, where a serial killer – who may be the original killer – starts picking off the patients one-by-one in the middle of a snowstorm.

Those patients are played by an impressive cavalcade of character actors: Jeffrey Wright (Westworld), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), Courtney B. Vance (American Crime Story), Sean Patrick Flanery (The Boondock Saints), and Robert Prosky (Christine), to name a few. The facility’s skeleton crew is also a Who’s Who of recognizable actors, including Kris Kristofferson (Blade), Polly Walker (Pennyworth), Stephen Lang (Don’t Breathe) and Tom Berenger (Platoon).

So let’s recap: Eye See You has a cast full of recognizable and incredibly talented actors, all of them thrown together into horrifying peril, in a concept that’s not exactly brilliant but is, at least, enjoyably high-concept. It was such a promising production that Ron Howard allegedly came close to directing it himself before opting to make How the Grinch Stole Christmas instead (which wound up being the highest grossing film of the year 2000, so that was probably the smart play).

What the heck happened to Eye See You that made it such a flop that Universal Studios dropped it? If only the answer was salacious or hilarious or bizarre. The simple fact is that the film, though hardly the worst that Stallone ever starred in, wasn’t very good.

Eye See You squanders a good set-up with laughable details and atrocious dialogue. If you ever wanted to see Sylvester Stallone try to romance Dina Meyers with a wind-up monkey toy, and telling her “Roses are obsolete, monkeys are the new language of love,” then you’re a very unusual person but this is definitely the movie for you. If you ever wanted to see a film in which Jeffrey Wright goes out in the middle of a blizzard to look for tracks in the snow – in the middle of a blizzard, I remind you – then the same is true.

One of the key plot points in Eye See You is that all of these characters who, again, are here because they are a danger to themselves and others, have to turn in their guns before they enter the detox center. Why, exactly, they were allowed to keep their service weapons after they tried to kill themselves is never explained, probably because it makes no sense.

What’s more, Eye See You completely squanders the obvious appeal of seeing this very impressive ensemble cast get to actually act together. There’s only one scene of their group therapy sessions before the plot kicks in, and the only thing they have to discuss from there on out is who’s the bad guy, whether they’re all going to split up and how badly screwed they all are.

It never occurs to these people to all stay in one place, to start a fire after the boiler breaks down, and simply wait out the storm. The whole film is built on extremely contrived reasons to split them all up so they can get killed one after the other. Which would be fine if this were a schlocky slasher made by someone with a sense of humor or at least outlandish bravado. Watching an all-star cast of macho character actors get butchered by an unseen bad guy is a great idea for good time, but watching it happen in such perfunctory fashion pretty much ruins it.

Eye See You was directed by Jim Gillespie, who was just coming off the blockbuster success of I Know What You Did Last Summer. He seems eager, here, to treat the film less like a slasher and more like a serious dramatic thriller. But the material is so hackneyed and corny that trying to take it seriously just makes it dull. Even the film’s big finale – in which Stallone impales the killer on a wheel of spikes and then pulls the killer off the spikes, lifts him over his head and impales him on the same spikes all over again – plays out like nobody noticed how awesome or weird it was.

There are worse horror films than Eye See You. There are worse Stallone films than Eye See You. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that if the film were worse, and had genuine camp value, Universal might have released it anyway just to make a quick buck. Instead, it’s practically a non-film. I’ve seen it three times now, for various reasons, and when I watched it again I had actually forgotten who the killer was. Not because it’s a clever script, but because it simply didn’t matter. Practically anyone in the cast could have been the murderer and Eye See You would have been essentially the same. That’s not typically the sign of a brilliant mystery.

Eye See You is a film for Stallone completionists only, or for horror lovers who are into obscure misfires. It’s not painful to watch, it’s just kinda dumb and perfunctory. If you want a REAL horror show from Sylvester Stallone, you should stick to [insert perfunctory lazy joke about Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot! or Judge Dredd here].