The Video Game-Based 2006 Horror Shocker Stay Alive is a Real Stinkeroo!
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PG-13 horror movies are considerate enough to let audiences know right off the bat that they won’t be too scary, or even very scary at all because of their rating. True, there are some sufficiently spooky movies that are PG-13, like The Sixth Sense, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Horror movies that go in for the lame half-measure that is PG-13 choose to eschew many of the elements that make horror movies popular and successful such as gore, horrific murders, graphic scenes of decapitation and defenestration, the filthiest fucking language you’ll ever hear in your whole shitty life, gratuitous nudity and of course colorful kills.
Some horror buffs treasure the genre specifically for its kills. That’s one of many places that the dire, PG-13 2006 horror stinker Stay Alive falls hopelessly short. In order to avoid the R rating all proper horror movies should have, the film repeatedly cuts from a character on the verge of being murdered to the aftermath of the killings.
This allows the movie to remain PG-13 despite featuring a lot of unimportant, forgettable characters dying what we can only assume would be VERY terrifying deaths if we were to have the opportunity to see them. But we can’t because the movie is PG-13.
Also working against Stay Alive being scary: it has what can reasonably be considered the stupidest fucking plot in horror history. The elevator pitch for Stay Alive is “Gamers play a sinister new video game and if they die in the game they die in real life.”
Stay Alive was so impressed by its idiotic premise that it apparently felt it did not have to be developed any further. So if you’re waiting for a twist that will make the movie seem less insulting you’re out of luck.
The final major factors working against Stay Alive not sucking on a historic level is that its only two memorable performances/characters are played by comic relief goofballs whose shenanigans couldn’t be less conducive to fright.
I am a big fan of the character actor Jimi Simpson. He’s a ubiquitous staple of television and film perhaps best known for his portrayal of feral sub-human creep Liam McPoyle on It’s Sunny in Philadelphia.
Stay Alive writer-director William Brent Bell, who made a uniquely unpromising directorial debut here but would go on to direct such hit terror tales as The Devil Inside, The Boy and Orphan: First Kill was understandably so impressed by Simpson’s ability to ad-lib and improvise tomfoolery that’s not in his god-awful screenplay that he clearly gave him free reign to go as big and goofy and broad as he wanted.
Simpson is unsurprisingly the best thing about Stay Alive but I’m not sure his performance belongs in a horror movie and not an R-rated stoner comedy.
The other goofball keeping Stay Alive from being scary is Frankie Muniz as a character regrettably named Swink whose defining characteristic is that he’s always wearing a dorky green visor different ways.
down and to the side.
Sometimes Swink will wear his visor the normal way. Sometimes he’ll wear it sideways AND upside down. Sometimes he’ll just wear it sideways. At no point is Muniz’s visor-based performance scary or entertaining.
Stay Alive begins with a trio of gamers dying deaths identical to the ones they suffered in the titular video game. At the funeral, Hutch (Jon Foster) is given some of the possessions of his dead friend, including the Stay Alive video game.
Because bad horror movies require their characters to behave like massive idiots Hutch, his girlfriend October (Sophia Busch), her brother Phineus (Simpson) and Swink decide that the best way to honor their dead friends is by playing the spooky game that might have killed them.
upside down and to the side!
They’re joined, from a distance, by Hutch’s video game-obsessed boss Miller Banks (Adam Goldberg), who decides to play online from his office. The boss ends up dying in real life the way he died in the game.
The game is based on Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman whose unspeakable crimes against girls and women are the stuff of legend. Is the Countess hunting for fresh victims from beyond the grave using shitty video game technology?
The video game at the center of Stay Alive is primitive and ugly even by the standards of the time. It’s grey and ugly and grim, with an unmistakable resemblance to several of the video games Uwe Boll adapted for film, specifically Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead.
Stay Alive fatally fails to understand its own ridiculousness. It’s the kind of oddly solemn stinker where a character will say “Hutch, somebody ran my brother down in a horse-drawn carriage! I’m gonna find whoever did it and I want to hurt them” without an ounce of humor or self-awareness.
It’s also the kind of movie where a major character will get fatally run over by a horse-drawn carriage in 2006 and it is played completely straight. Simpson, incidentally is the poor soul who dies under the wheels of an old-timey vehicle.
Simpson only makes it about halfway through the movie. I was bummed that the film’s only source of entertainment and humor was now gone but I was happy for Simpson that he was free to work on better projects. By definition, pretty much any project Simpson would go on to do would be better than Stay Alive.
In the third act the surviving gamers decide to travel to the evil Countess’ haunting grounds, the sinister Gerouge Plantation. The evil Countess begins cheating by killing dumbasses who are not dead in Stay Alive. I lost a lot of respect for her because of that. It’s one thing to be a mass murderer who kills people when you’re alive and also when you’re dead. It’s quite another to not play fair.
The vain Countess is defeated by being shown her own reflection but the evil of the game lives on when it becomes commercially available.
Stay Alive is about as short as a movie can be while still being feature-length at eighty-five minutes but those eighty-five minutes pass slowly and joylessly. I watched Last Action Hero right before Stay Alive. The notorious Arnold Schwarzenegger flop is forty-five minutes longer yet feels significantly shorter.
Everything about Stay Alive promises that the film will suck. It makes good on that promise.
According to Wikipedia and Bell, the filmmakers are, as of this moment “trying very hard to make another one”.
Don’t bother! One was too many. We don’t need a follow-up.
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