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So last week's DTV release of Aladdin and the King of Thieves, in which Robin Williams reprises his role as the thousand-voiced Genie, was the event of a lackluster movie month. This time Aladdin searches for his missing father and discovers that Dad is a sort of Darth Vader, but nicer. The songs are wan, and the animation (done in Australia and Japan) isn't as spiffy as the studio's theatrical style. But Williams works harder than ever to create a bazaar of bizarre impressions: Woody and Sly, Hope and Crosby, Groucho and Chico and Brando, instantly repackaged into clever parody.
Disney plans to release three or four DTV features a year, including sequels to The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and 101 Dalmatians, maybe Toy Story, and the live-action Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Other majors won't be far behind. Fox is readying a prequel to Casper.
So where does this leave the DTV pioneers? In trouble. Ask Roger Corman, who has thrived directing and producing B, C and Z movies for four decades and now runs New Horizons, a DTV factory. "We're seeing a slippage over the past two years of about 25% in our total video rentals," says Corman. "Just as the majors once crowded the independent producers out of theaters, now they're crowding us out of direct-to-video."
Andrew Stevens is even more emphatic. "Video is a wheezing, gasping, last bastion of collectors and a dwindling number of renters!" he roars. As a DTV icon, Stevens got candle wax dripped on his chest by Tanya Roberts in Night Eyes and got smothered in fruit by Shannon Tweed in Night Eyes 2 ("Nice use of raspberries," notes the invaluable Bare Facts Video Guide, which catalogs nude scenes in R-rated movies). But as the co-owner of Royal Oaks Entertainment, which produces a dozen or so action-adventure titles a year for the foreign market, he's pleased to say R.I.P. to low-budget DTV. "The studios increased their output of theatrical films, the mom-and-pop video stores got squeezed out by the major chains, and the advent of satellite and DirecTV alleviated the necessity of driving to a corner video store. In short, the novelty of video has worn off."
Many DTV veterans are frustrated. "The market has gotten tougher and tougher," says superhack Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Bad Girls from Mars), who last week started directing his sixth film this year. "Nowadays, you have to do more for less money to make less money. Genres like vampire films and erotic thrillers and cyborg takeoffs of Terminator are all dead."
The medium used to be a refuge or a launching pad. As Maitland McDonagh writes in her excellent book Filmmaking on the Fringe, "Direct-to-video movies are made by people who once made--or, in the case of the younger generation, would have made--theatrical features." But that thrill is evaporating. "There's so much crap in the marketplace," complains Greg Brown, a Stanford grad who directed the toniest of the DTV erotomovies (Animal Instincts, Body of Influence) under the name Gregory Hippolyte. And where does he go for artistic challenges? Into porno. "With triple-X," he says, "I can explore video imaging, different film stocks and all sorts of weird underground stuff as long as I have the obligatory pornography. When I made erotic thrillers, they wanted things that look like movies of the week."