Well, Dish did a bad, bad thing. They added a bunch of "bonus" streaming channels. They are grouped by category and one of the movie channels is The Asylum Channel...which is all the awful $5 budget copycat movies featuring the occasional once big star. I'm watching the amazing Asteroid--a-geddon starring Eric Roberts as I type. They must have booked him for the week as just yesterday I watched another stellar Asteroid themed movie with him. He was the commander of something, dressed in camo, carrying and playing with what looked like ben-wa balls the whole time.


I can't help but stop and watch this channel, it's so awesomely awful! Which of course, got me thinking which current star is next to end up on the Asylum/DTV movie dumpster?

I haven't been following Asylum at all since...they first started producing rip-offs. (EDIT: I just looked them up and the first one was based on War of the Worlds.)

What stars have been in these films before Eric Roberts?

(A quick check reveals Bruce Davison in one and Tara Reid in SHARKNADO although I don't recall what the hell Tara Reid was famous for before then.)

The Big Lebowski, maybe?



Also American Pie…

I am jelly that you can watch a channel devoted to Asylum films.

I’ve seen way too many Asylum movies on cheap dollar-store DVDs over the years. Pretty much always disappointing. However, they do seem to have provided steady income for Roberts – who would probably show up in your birthday party video for a few bucks at this point – as well as former and almost somebodies like Armand Assante, Michael Madsen, William Baldwin, Michael Pare, Bai Ling, Tom Sizemore, Jane March, Ving Rhames, John Savage, James Caan, Treat Williams and a whole bunch more. Most of these folks flirted, however long or brief, with A-list studio pictures (or tv shows) and respect before diving down the rabbit hole and ending up in this stuff, so it stands to reason that some among the newer generations of leading and supporting stars we’re seeing in studio films today will end up in the lower ranks eventually, or somewhere in between.

Reminds me of the former box-office champs who’ve become stock players in the films produced by Randall Emmett and George Furla, low-to-mid-budget stuff that usually goes straight to video, with a tiny fraction getting a theatrical run. This is where you’ve often seen Willis, Travolta, Stallone, DeNiro, Gibson, Kilmer, Pacino, Cage, Freeman, Cusack, Malkovich, and a few others semi-slumming it to pay the bills.

Sometimes it’s that batch (the living ones, anyway) who still retain just enough credibility to pepper this obvious paycheck work with an occasional A-list picture, cult-y fest darling (Cage seems to do these regularly), or prestige streaming series, but I do wonder if it’s only a matter of time before one or more of them turns up in a SHARKNADO revival.

Those guys ain't poor. I'd say it's more they just like to work.

I'd say it's more they like to get paid a lot to not work very hard.

Didn't Bruce Willis get paid a million dollars for a few days of shooting on one of these movies?

I think Mark Wahlberg is next in line to join the DTV movie ranks as he's kind of backed away from the Hollywood system of making movies.

I think Willis’s quote was $1 million per shooting day.

If those types of movies initially starred action stars of the 80s (Stallone, Willis, Dolph Lundgren) and then moved to action stars of the 90s (Nic Cage, John Travolta, Mel Gibson) it’s only logical the next group would be action stars of the early 2000s. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Will Smith, Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, etc. eventually start star in these types of movies in the near future.

I also realize I’m generalizing by combining “Asylum” movies with the typical straight-to-video dreck we see pop up on Netflix and Prime.

I think Will Smith needs another decade of doing movies and more flops to his name before he heads to DTV movies. If you ever saw the videos RedLetter Media did on Bruce Willis they called them "Geezer Teasers". DTV movies meant for aging movie stars with the big name as the Pull.

He currently does well with the streamers, so I guess he will be milking that cow. The Union (Netflix), The Familly Plan (Apple), Me Time (Netflix), Infinite (Paramount+) and Spenser Confidential (Netflix) have good production values and other talented people attached. Wahlberg is also producing a lot of his movies.

For me, Nicolas Cage is the exception, to most of the other guys. Most of his B-movies are terrible, but you always get Nicolas Cage. He's not on autopilot cashing his check, he delivers a Nic Cage performance.

Wow, MegaShark vs Kolossus. I guess even award winning character actors need money, lol. Illeana Douglas starring alongside Ernest Thomas!! Raj from What's Happening!! Dang, such a strange cast.

Oh wow, that's what happened to Jane March? I certainly liked her 90s movies. She wasn't shy about disrobing on camera, either. Always a plus.

I was browsing the movies in the library here earlier this week and noticed NARC from 2002, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually seen it. Solid movie, even if it felt a bit like a pilot episode to a great 90’s TV cop show, but it reminded me how Jason Patric went from being reasonably reliable in semi-A-list stuff in the 90’s and the turn of the century to mostly B-movies and DTV fare for the last 20 years or so. I kept waiting for him to pop up onscreen in TERRIFIER 3 and by the time it was over I had to look him up to see who he played, mainly because, well, he’s gotten older and in that film they kinda played up on that to the point where I didn’t recognize him at first.

As this thread shows, there are plenty like him toiling down in the trenches. And hey, a gig’s a gig, and if you can bring any ‘marquee’ value to the Asylum sleeve or a streaming thumbnail poster, you can probably keep a steady income rolling in.

For Patric, unfortunately, that apparently means rolling with the GOD’S NOT DEAD churchy crew on an upcoming ‘action thriller’ see to starring David A.R. White (a veteran of Christian crap), plus, umm, the regrettable Cuba Gooding Jr. and, uhh, the even more regrettable Scott Baio. I expect the most favourable critic quotes will come from the current U.S. administration.

The A-list doesn’t last forever, I suppose (unless you’re Tom Cruise). And with so much stuff being cranked out today to keep audiences distracted every way they look, it’s probably hard for these folks not to find work, even if it’s rarely quality work.

I have to imagine for a lot of people in these things, it comes down to ego and being too difficult to work with in more mainstream fare. I think some simply have bad agents or can't replicate early successes, but I don't think it's coincidence that a lot of people mentioned in this thread have reputations as assholes.

Good point. I also think that because of their egos a lot of ‘celebs’ simply can’t give up the ‘leading role’ mentality even after their time has passed, so they go from lead roles in studio films to lead roles in Asylum films and whatnot. Must be a weird sense of empowerment lording it over a crew of low-budget hacks on the fringes.