Editorials
‘Eye See You’: Have YOU Seen Sylvester Stallone’s Only Horror Movie?
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].
Editorials
Before ‘The Blair Witch Project’, ‘Alien Autopsy’ Showed How Real Found Footage Could Feel
The line separating artist from con man is a lot thinner than you might initially believe. While I think we can all agree that lying for the sake of profit is actively malicious behavior, isn’t it also true that the faux documentary aspect of The Blair Witch Project is half the reason why that film became such a cultural phenomenon? After all, if there’s one thing filmmakers have in common with stage magicians, it’s that misleading and misdirecting audiences is simply part of the job.
That’s why I’ve developed a habit of mostly ignoring the moral quandaries behind many of film and television’s biggest “hoaxes” in favor of appreciating the narrative elements that drive productions like Mermaids: The Body Found and even Animal Planet’s highly underrated The Cannibal in the Jungle. However, if there’s a definitive case of a highly publicized broadcast fooling the world into taking it seriously, it has to be Fox’s infamous 1995 TV special Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction.
It’s been over three decades since that eerie footage first haunted television screens right at the peak of the ’90s ufology craze, and in that time, the video has taken on a life of its own. From countless parodies and references in everything from The X-Files to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (as well as John Dower’s recently released tell-all documentary The Alien Autopsy Scandal, which I’d highly recommend to genre fans everywhere), there’s no denying the legacy of the Alien Autopsy video. However, I rarely see the tape discussed as what it truly is: a highly convincing found footage film directed by a passionate stage magician and brought to life by masterful practical effects work.
That’s why I’d like to invite readers to join me on a deep dive into one of the most infamous broadcasts of all time in an attempt to reevaluate the footage as a fascinating narrative experience rather than a complete hoax.
The TV Special That Convinced Millions It Was Real
Ray Santilli next to Extraterrestrial replica in ‘The Alien Autopsy Scandal’
For starters, regardless of whether or not you believe that there was in fact an extraterrestrial crash in Roswell during the summer of 1947 and that some form of autopsy was performed on the victims, the producers behind the black & white recordings, Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield, insist that their video was a “restoration.” Though I’d argue that the proper word is “remake”of genuine footage that was too damaged to air on television. That’s why the duo went on to recruit filmmaker and eccentric magician Spyros Melaris and sculptor/monster designer John Humphreys to bring their version of the autopsy to life and sell it to the highest bidder.
This is where the story of the Alien Autopsy as a narrative experience really begins. Melaris claims that his approach to the faux recording consisted of striving for extreme period accuracy in both shooting equipment and setting while also planting subtle details that would initially seem like mistakes but could later be revealed to actually fit the time period. That being said, the filmmaker was under the impression that the short would be released for free as a PR stunt, with the team later producing and selling an informative documentary chronicling exactly how the footage was faked and commenting on how easy it is to manipulate public perception with a good old-fashioned magic trick.
This obviously isn’t how things went down, and that’s likely the reason why Melaris has since distanced himself from everyone else involved with the project. Yet, no amount of behind-the-scenes drama can undermine the genuine effort that went into making the short as impressive as it is. From the sourcing of real animal organs from a local butcher to make the organic part of the creature more lifelike to the highly detailed sculpt that made use of a hollowed-out underlayer that could be filled with fake blood and assorted viscera, there’s a reason why so many Hollywood specialists are still impressed with the artistry on display here.
Of course, the believability is only half the story, as I think that the best part of the autopsy is how Melaris builds on the existing tension by obscuring certain details and often embracing the chaos of what a real examination of extraterrestrial life could feel like. The camera often goes out of focus at just the right time to make certain effects hit even harder, and we can only speculate as to what the hazmat-suited doctors are gesticulating about during the operation. There’s a real air of mystery to the whole thing that almost makes it feel like a cosmically terrifying, cursed film containing forbidden knowledge that civilians were never meant to see.
So when Fox’s Fact or Fiction brings in the specialists to comment on the film and its otherworldly subject, it’s no surprise that we end up with one of the most memorable mockumentaries of all time – albeit one where the participants are unaware that the footage they’re commenting on is basically a large-scale practical joke. A joke that the network was obviously in on, as many participants claim that the TV special cut out significant portions where guests point out that they believe the footage to be an elaborate hoax.
The Lasting Impact of the Hoax Turned Cultural Event
Regardless, I remember going to bed terrified after watching reruns of the special and thinking about the respected pathologist who claimed that the body was almost certainly inhuman, with even effects maestro Stan Winston commenting on how difficult it would be to recreate some of these visuals through practical puppetry. That’s not even mentioning Jonathan Frakes’ dramatic hyping up of the disturbing imagery as if he was talking about the tape from The Ring, with his spooky demeanor here likely being responsible for his later role as the host of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction a few years later.
Personally, I’d argue that the Alien Autopsy phenomenon had just as much of an impact on me as a horror fan as The Blair Witch Project, a film that was almost certainly influenced by the success of this immensely popular hoax (to the point where they even produced their own TV special commenting on Heather’s found footage). Even if Fox didn’t intend to produce a narrative feature about the aftermath of the Roswell crash, the end product still holds up remarkably well as a highly entertaining mockumentary exploring the idea that we may not be alone in the universe.
While neither Santilli nor the rest of the production team has ever commented on this, I also think it’s very likely that the idea of a faux Alien Autopsy could have been influenced by Dean Alioto’s The McPherson Tape/UFO Abduction. I’ve already written about how this granddaddy of found footage was co-opted by rogue ufologists who began selling bootlegs of the tape at conventions as if it were real evidence of a close encounter, so it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that Santilli and company could have heard about this phenomenon and been inspired to come up with their own highly profitable hoax.
At the end of the day, it’s unlikely that the Alien Autopsy film is recreating any real footage from Roswell, but I can still appreciate the short and the accompanying television event as a standalone horror story that still influences the way we see found footage to this very day.
After all, the possibility that something could be real is often much scarier than finding out for sure – and that’s why I think Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction is still worth revisiting three decades down the line.
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