The one movie Sylvester Stallone called the “most horribly produced film” he was ever in
The parallels Sylvester Stallone shares with his generational creation, Rocky Balboa, are hard to ignore.
Both men discovered an inner reserve of determination to ensure that they wouldn’t falter in the first round but make their way to the top and become triumphant one way or another. While Balboa’s was all about the victor in the ring, Stallone’s own success was Rocky itself and the Hollywood life it would provide.
But while Rocky, alongside Rambo, Creed, and maybe a few other pictures, rank among some of Stallone’s better works, like his famous character, the actor has taken his fair share of batterings over the years and starred in some truly awful movies.
Stallone has won an astonishing 12 Razzie awards, making him the most decorated actor in the history of the awards show, which seeks to pick out the worst performances and movies of any given year. Looking through his resume, it is easy to see why he might have been gifted so many of the infamous awards. The calibre of cinema Stallone has appeared in is especially poor.
“I made some truly awful movies,” Stallone once said. “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was the worst. If you ever want someone to confess to murder, just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.” Stallone went on to admit that Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot is “the worst film I’ve ever made by far”.
He continued: “Maybe one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen… A flatworm could write a better script than Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. In some countries — China, I believe — running Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, once a week on government television, has lowered the birth rate to zero.”
While nobody can expect Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot to be anywhere but the bottom of the pile when it comes to taking a gander at his filmography, there is one picture that might just pip it to the post. Escape Plan 2: Hades is the middle entry of a trilogy that almost nobody wants to sit down and watch.
A man able to stretch a story out across multiple films, with Creed, Rocky, Rambo and The Expendables all enjoying a multi-movie run, in promotion of the third in the series of Escape Plan movies, was quickly able to pinpoint the second instalment as perhaps the worst of his career.
“Escape Plan 2 was truly the most horribly produced film I have ever had the misfortune to be in,” and that is a sentence that holds some serious weight. Stallone has some of the worst movies ever made under his belt, so to call this one, which would have probably passed most Sly-aficionados by like any other of his gun-toting brawls. But, for the actor, it paled in comparison to the third instalment, which he said he was immensely “proud” of.
It just goes to show that while we might not always be able to topple the giants in any given field, we, like Stallone, should always be striving for our best. As a man once said, “It’s not about how good a movie you can make, it’s about how bad a movie you can make and still keep making movies.”
