5 Films That Were DOA and Premiered on VOD

One of the advantages to being a well-known actor is that if you want to experiment behind the camera, studios are more than willing to take a chance on you. They’ll invest the money you need, hire the best crew they can, and do everything in their power to ensure your film receives attention from both domestic and international press. In some cases, actors or actresses prove themselves to be spellbinding storytellers, proving themselves more than just pretty faces. Rob Reiner, Clint Eastwood, and Jon Favreau are just a few examples. Other times, you end up with a Ryan Gosling fiasco.

When Gosling screened his directorial debut Lost River at Cannes last year, he was met with jeers from filmgoers and critics alike, panned for producing a pile of pretentious sludge. Studio executives were ripe with concern, and after what I imagine were some intense hours of deliberation over what to do with a project that they were hoping would make waves, they decided to release Lost River straight to on-demand platforms.

Growing in popularity, and gaining fresh recognition with The Interview, VOD releases have become a haven for films that were judged unable to cut it in theaters. Gosling may have been the freshest actor-turned-director to face the implied indignity of VOD, but he’s not the first, nor will he be the last. Here are five other actors whose films were stripped of a theatrical release and sent straight to home viewing.

Rob Schneider’s Big Stan

Rob Schneider may have been the king of oddball comedies in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s after a reputable run on Saturday Night Live, but his directorial debut was met with lackluster enthusiasm from even the most devoted of his fans. The film centers on Schneider’s Stan, a pathetic and unintimidating con man who gets sentenced to prison for fraud. In an attempt to beef himself up for hard time, he hires a martial arts guru. Like in any comedy, however, nothing actually goes according to plan. Nothing about the movie’s intended effect goes according to plan, either, and what we’re left with is a blathering mess. For a higher-budgeted version of this exact storyline, be sure to check out Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart’s upcoming Get Hard.

Dolph Lundgren’s The Mechanik (The Russian Specialist in the United States)

Chances are you already know what kind of movie to expect when you Google the name of the man who killed 28 people in The Expendables 2. While Dolph Lundgren may be a beloved action star, his straight-to-DVD film misses its mark … by a couple thousand miles. After Nick Cherenko’s takes vengeance against the Russian mobsters who murdered his wife and daughter, he tries make a new life for himself in Los Angeles. But he’s discovered by another Russian ex-pat, who threatens to reveal his secret identity unless he helps her recover her kidnapped daughter. He only agrees, however, when he discovers that the man behind the kidnapping is the gangster who killed his family, somehow still alive.

Robert Englund’s Killer Pad

It only makes sense that the godfather of horrific movie monsters would eventually strip himself of makeup and step behind the lens. The premise of his 2008 straight-to-VOD/DVD film is the definition of simple: three good friends move into a haunted house and have to contend with the paranormal forces they encounter. Killer Pad is a horror-comedy that fails to balance the horror and the comedy, neither funny nor scary as a result. Critics didn’t know what to make of the movie, and apparently, the studio didn’t either. Bypassing a theatrical release was the best decision anyone ever made on this production.

Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno

Eli Roth went from focusing on a directing career (with acting stints in all of his films), to producing the work of up-and-coming horror directors, to starring in Inglorious Basterds, to directing once again. The Green Inferno tells the story of a group of college friends (it’s always a group of college friends) who travel to the Amazon in an attempt to save it from further destruction. Upon arrival, however, they learn that there are people lurking within the luscious green canopy with “tastes” that they couldn’t have conceived of. Deemed too violent for theaters, The Green Inferno floated in limbo for a while before getting a VOD release. Yet a woman cutting out her own eyeball in Hostel is apparently the perfect Friday night treat for the entire family.

James Franco’s As I Lay Dying

Let’s address the massive elephant taking up all the oxygen at the back of the room: most of James Franco’s directorial efforts should go VOD, yet there are more posters made for his pretentious literary adaptations than there are people who want to see them. While Child of God and The Sound and the Fury received theatrical distribution, As I Lay Dying was slated for the home market. Based on William Faulkner’s celebrated novel of the same name, As I Lay Dying tells the story of one family’s desperate journey to bury matriarch Addie Bundren in her Jefferson hometown. Without the book’s prose and creative narration (from fifteen different characters), the movie loses much of what made it one of the best novels of the 20th century. Perhaps Franco should forget adapting time-honored books to film, and stick to writing essays on them for UCLA or NYU.