Sylvester Stallone isn’t known for his horror output, but the star does have one horror movie to his name in the form of forgotten slasher D-Tox. Since his career began back in the early 1970s, Rocky star Sylvester Stallone has made a name for himself as an action hero, a surprisingly solid character actor, and even a self-aware comic performer. One genre the hulking star has largely avoided, though, is horror.
While it may seem sensible for a screen tough guy to steer clear of horror given his reputation as an unflappable hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Predator or Bruce Willis’ The Sixth Sense prove that there is room for action cinema’s leading men to star in the occasional scary movie. Unfortunately for Stallone, his lone pure horror effort was a flop whose failure makes the actor’s avoidance of the genre before and since easier to understand.
While Stallone underrated Cobra from 1986 has elements of a slasher flick thanks to its fittingly named villain The Night Slasher, it's more of an action film. However, D-Tox - AKA Eye See You - is the lone Stallone horror movie that can truly be counted as a pure slasher. Sadly, it’s also pretty widely agreed to be a leaden, uninvolving dud. D-Tox is a somewhat drab riff on Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None and the setting invokes John Carpenter’s The Thing, but it lacks the simple setup of the former or the gory shocks of the latter.
D-Tox sees Stallone’s grieving cop Jake and a group of other law enforcement officers trapped in a remote addiction clinic, with one among them being the brutal serial killer who murdered Jake's lover. Originally intended to be a follow-up Stallone's acclaimed turn in Copland, D-Tox was part of the actor’s attempt to move away from action and into more diverse roles as he began to age out of fistfights - not that this issue got in the way of later Expendables and Rambo franchise installments. However, after bad test screenings, Universal shelved D-Tox and the movie went on to sit in limbo for years before being given a limited release in 2002. Stallone himself spoke of why the movie was essentially DOA with AICN in 2006:
It’s very simple why D-TOX landed in limbo… For some unknown reason, the original producer pulled out, and right away the film was considered damaged goods… 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… 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.
Reshoots to the poorly-received original cut of the slasher movie may have added a more dramatic final fight between Stallone and the killer, but this last-minute fix wasn’t enough to save D-Tox from a critical drubbing. Still, Stallone at least had a laugh making the movie: “When we were met at the airport by the teamsters they’d have a sign in front of them saying DETOX, and all these actors like Kris Kristofferson, Tom Berenger, and myself looked like we were going into rehab rather than a film shoot." The woeful reception of D-Tox put an early end to the star's horror career before it could begin in earnest, although the gory subterranean finale of Rambo: Last Blood could arguably be called another sort of Stallone-starring slasher flick. Plus, there's always a chance his long-mooted adaptation of monster novel Hunter - which he once planned to turn into Rambo 5 - could happen.