You know what a Pay Rent Movie is, some people call them Direct-to-DVD… We’ve all seen them, those movie trailers for movies that are so low budget the SyFy channel passed on it like “that shit looks too fake.” Even still your favorite actor from summers past are starring in them. They’ve all done it, Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes, Michael Keaton, Antonio Banderas, Robert DeNiro… It would take me longer to list them all than writers spend on writing the script. Which forces you to wonder “How the FUCK did they get these guys to be in this movie?” It because they are hard up for cash and they need to Pay Their Rent… That’s why they’re in it.
90% of Pay Rent movies will only be seen on DVD. Just look at the last few years of Wesley Snipes career: The Art of War II, The Contractor, Hard Luck, The Detonator, The Marksman, 7 seconds. The less we speak of Gallowwalkers the better. Truthfully, we at TOT love Wesley and only hate on him for two reasons: We know what he’s capable of (Blade, New Jack City, Mo’ Better Blues) and we hate that Ant always talks about him. But he’s made some bad career choices.
Even the greats from time to time need to add an extension to their house and end up making something like Edison Force:
Joshua Pollack has discovered a glitch in the system, and as a fledgling journalist he sees it as his duty to expose the corruption. When Pollack misjudges the depth of the authoritative decay and his girlfriend is hospitalized following a brutal attack by the alliance of crooked cops known as F.R.A.T., he soon decides to take action and prove that even those who believe themselves to be above the law still aren’t beyond its reach.
Starring Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, LL Cool J, Dylan McDermott and… Justin Timberlake. There’s a squad of crooked cops called F.R.A.T. I’d move to the rain forest they filmed Anaconda in before I watch this movie.
Speaking of Anaconda, sometimes these movies actually make it into the theatre for one weekend and everyone wonders what the hell just happened? You can see in the trailer that everyone involved didn’t give a shit and they were on set for the check and Kraft Services. That’s how you end up with not one but two movies based on holidays: New Year’s Eve & Valentine’s Day. These two movies star at least 10+ Oscar nominees, 5 winners, directed by a hollywood legend, Gary Marshall and garnered a Rotten Tomatoes score of 25%.
Let’s not pick on Rom Com’s. Although they deserve all the scorn bloggers can muster… let’s turn to Action movies since they don’t fall into this, right? WRONG. Last month, I, Frankenstein premiered and immediately garnered Pay Rent movie of the 2014. This is how the pitch went:
Agent: “Aaron Eckhart, you’ve starred in Thank You for Smoking. You were just the President in Olympus Has Fallen and you starred in one of the highest grossing films of all-time, The Dark Knight. What you need is a movie where Frankensteins… wait let finish, Frankensteins and Gargoyles replace Vampires and Werewolves in Underworld and we’ll get the same actors, producers from that series. We’ll even shoot it to look just like that movie. We’ll pay you four million American dollars.”
Eckhart: Looks at credit card statement… thinks about the new Xbox One that’s coming out… “Throw in a Leather jacket, a hoodie and I’m in.” Boom now we have sexy Frankenstein appearing in Gap Ads fighting gargoyles over London.
Now you know what a Pay Rent Movies is. You just need to learn how to spot them before you waste your time and watch them. Shout out to One of the all-time greats of Pay Rent movies: Eugene Levy who’s been in like 137 American Pies since the first movie came out in 1999.
