Review: Stay Alive
Stay Alive
Dir William Brent Bell
Stay Alive is a new teen horror flick revolving around the tagline: “You die in the game, you die for real.” The premise is that the game of the title is the prototype of the next generation in digital fantasy, with the line between life and the game becoming blurred. When our hero Hutch’s (Jon Foster) friend dies gruesomely, a number of his games are passed to him.
In among them is an underground horror survival computer game, based on the seventeenth century true-life serial killer the Blood Countess. Hutch’s other gamers are desperate to have a go at this illegal underground copy, not realising that it is no ordinary game. Soon the characters start to get knocked off one-by-one, but little is known of the killer’s identity. The premise of the plot is a cross between The Ring and Final Destination.
Supposedly one is meant to unravel the haunting mystery of the missing girls who were in the Countesses’ care, but it is so breathtakingly obvious that the scary thing is, in fact, that none of the characters figure it out until the end. At times the film is able to blur reality and the game and starts to get quite exciting, especially as the game turns out not to have any rules apart from to try to stay alive.
Like all basic teen movies, it plays up to stereotypes, but the script keeps them that way: onedimensional. The characters are all good-looking with silly names like Phineus, trying to make gaming seem super-slick and cool, but instead ending up annoying. Frankie Muniz is the biggest name in the film and, forgetting the upside down visor, turns out to give one of the better performances. The whole do-not-go-in-there feeling you get with most horror films is stretched to breaking point.
The script, being an amalgamation of dire past film clichés, makes you pity the actors, but starts to provide quite a laugh: the echo of a Titanic quote towards the end got quite a few chuckles, especially as the film takes itself so seriously. Being a 12A does not allow the film to be too gory, but will still appeal to Saw fans and does provide some visual shocks. But. ultimately, Stay Alive is one for the rental list.
Although it is not one of the better horror films I have seen, I did have to sleep with the light on that night.
8th Jun 2006