Stay Alive

Well done, makers of Stay Alive. I've seen stupider slasher films...but not many.

Here are the things I liked about Stay Alive:

(1) Coked-up Adam Goldberg. 30% more movies released each year should include a coked-up Adam Goldberg.

(2) Frankie Muniz has not shortened his name to Frank Muniz in order to get more "adult" roles. This would seem to be a natural progression. Just as Bow Wow was forced to drop his "Li'l" and Ricky Schroeder transformed magically into "Rick" (even Debbie Gibson moved over to Deborah when the time was right), you'd figure Frankie would go to Frank now that he's hoping to no longer be saddled by the spazzy starring role he had in the most shrill and obnoxious sitcom ever.

(3) The fact that a major character is trampled to death by an out of control CG horse-drawn carriage. I wish there was an audio recording available of the pitch meeting for this stinkbomb.

-"Then, the guy gets run down by a runaway horse-drawn carriage."
-"What? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
-"Don't worry. We can do it with CGI."
-"Oh. Okay, then."

That's it. Everything else blows.



Stay Alive is one of those lame slasher movies that can't even get the grisly death part right. Several of the murders take place almost entirely off-screen. There's a shot of a character running in fear, a blurry shot of some unseen enemy advancing, then a POV shot racing right towards teh character's face, then you cut to the next scene and we see they've been bloodied and butchered.

Hey, we're not watching your BS movie for its riveting plot, that's TOTALLY not just taken part and parcel from The Ring. We're watching it because it's a horror movie that will hopefully include some semi-entertaining kill scenes. If you can't make that happen, don't bother. Just make Big Fat Liar 2 as long as you've got Frank Muniz on the set and call it a day.

Likewise, writer/director William Brent Bell and his co-writer Matthew Peterman routinely break the cardinal rule of horror/fantasy filmmaking. They set up a supervillain totally unburdened by any rules of conduct or physical properties of the universe. The murderous Blood Countess - who liked to bathe in the blood of little girls before being tortured and killed by angry parents - can kill anyone at any time, and it's totally indiscriminate, which kind of kills any opportunity for actual tension. No rules means anything can happen, which in turn means that the story never makes any sense.

Hutch (John O'Neill) and his goony friends have gotten their hands on an underground bootleg video game called "Stay Alive." After playing for a while, then witnessing a couple of murders, Hutch comes to realize that the game is actually killing its players. If you die in the game, well, you die in the real world, and in the same gruesome fashion.

Obviously, this sets up a major scripting problem right away. If you only die in the real world once you've died in the game, wouldn't you just stop playing the game? "Hey, this shit might really kill me. Maybe I'll just forget about that one and pop in Donkey Kong Country." Bell never really devises a way out of this problem. Instead, he presents a lame shortcut - well, if you stop playing the game, it just keeps playing for you. Oh, okay, then.

It's just one of several silly devices that Bell relies upon to push his clunky, boring narrative forward. A long detour to the home of the game's creator, a creepy hillbilly who doesn't seem to know what kind of evil his programming has unleashed, leads absolutely nowhere and takes forever. We follow a pointless police investigation into the deaths (the detective obviously suspects Hutch, who knows all of the victims) that has absolutely no payoff in the end and seems designed only to eat up screen time.

What's most surprising is how rarely Bell even manages to work in gamer culture, the co-opting of which would appear to be the entire purpose for making this movie. At the outset, it's clear that Bell and Peterman's screenplay wants to reference video games and gamers, in the same way that a movie like Hackers wanted to appeal to the "in" geeky subculture of the moment. (There's an early reference to Unreal Tournament that I suppose is meant to show solidarity with the game nerds, but which only makes the characters seem like poseurs.)

Save for a brief scene at the end in which Muniz's character realizes he can "guide" his friends around the real world by playing the video game, there's really no on-screen action that invovles the titular entertainment. As I said, pretty soon the deaths don't even link up to the actual character's game play (the game starts playing for them), so the movie comes to mention the game with less and less frequency. As opposed to The Ring, which made the interaction of recording technology and reality a constant motif, Stay Alive just uses video games as a lame hook before descending into stale horror movie staples like the "chase through the cemetary," the "visit to the old decaying mansion" and the "face off with the pale white ghost lady."

The worst of these sequences features the gang visiting a wacky Cajun mystic who tells them all about the Countess and her sins against humanity. At least, I think she's supposed to be Cajun. The accent makes her sound more like Gilda Radner's impression of Barbra Walters. ("She must pwepare for the wesurrwection. The bwood of the innocent will be spiwwed tonight.") Nothing to do with the game, no antediluvian New Orleans color to speak of, just the most misplaced and tired horror cliche imaginable. It's just lazy filmmaking and it's unworthy of any further attention.

Oh, okay, one last thing...Why would the ghost of an old lady bury her soul in a video game? My grandmother can't even figure out how to work a stereo, let alone integrating her ethereal being along with the technology as a way to murder unsuspecting teens. Couldn't she think of any better way to get at the living than by having a guy create a video game starring her that would lead young people to her home so that they might be drained of their blood ritualistically? I mean, that's one convoluted way to prey upon innocent souls.