While not quite Mazes and Monsters dumb, it's really close. I mean, close enough that this film could pop down the street and ask Mazes and Monsters for a cup of sugar.
The film begins with Peter from Heroes (Milo Ventimiglia) playing a video game that is too spoopy for me and gets himself killed by a pale woman in a red dress. He is naturally freaked out, but even more so when he dies in the exact same manner that he did within the game!!! Ooooh!
...spooky? Right? It's spooky.
At his funeral, his best friend Hutch (Jon Foster) meets totally not love interest girl Abigail (Samaire Armstrong) who gives him some of Peter's things including the disc of the game. So he decides to get together with her, his girlfriend October (Sophia Bush), her brother, Hutch's boss from work, and another guy (Frankie Muniz, who is introduced interestingly enough by jump scare).
Because they're all gamers, but they have never played any Dungeons & Dragons, they immediately speak the mystic chant when the game "Stay Alive" opens. Because reading the mystic chant curse of vaguely evil death is always a good idea and anyone who tells you differently clearly doesn't want you to be possessed by Cthulhu. What an idiot they must be, am I right?
Nevertheless, their chanting gets them all hooked into the game and when you die in the game...you die for real, simple as that. However, it's not remotely that simple. Apparently, the game is possessed by the vicious spirit of Elizabeth Bathory (Maria Kalinina) - who wants to kill them all because...um...evil. She also, in this universe, established a finishing school for girls in Louisiana in the 1800s where she killed several of them using her historical MO.
The film begins with Peter from Heroes (Milo Ventimiglia) playing a video game that is too spoopy for me and gets himself killed by a pale woman in a red dress. He is naturally freaked out, but even more so when he dies in the exact same manner that he did within the game!!! Ooooh!
...spooky? Right? It's spooky.
At his funeral, his best friend Hutch (Jon Foster) meets totally not love interest girl Abigail (Samaire Armstrong) who gives him some of Peter's things including the disc of the game. So he decides to get together with her, his girlfriend October (Sophia Bush), her brother, Hutch's boss from work, and another guy (Frankie Muniz, who is introduced interestingly enough by jump scare).
Because they're all gamers, but they have never played any Dungeons & Dragons, they immediately speak the mystic chant when the game "Stay Alive" opens. Because reading the mystic chant curse of vaguely evil death is always a good idea and anyone who tells you differently clearly doesn't want you to be possessed by Cthulhu. What an idiot they must be, am I right?
Nevertheless, their chanting gets them all hooked into the game and when you die in the game...you die for real, simple as that. However, it's not remotely that simple. Apparently, the game is possessed by the vicious spirit of Elizabeth Bathory (Maria Kalinina) - who wants to kill them all because...um...evil. She also, in this universe, established a finishing school for girls in Louisiana in the 1800s where she killed several of them using her historical MO.
Kind of amazing considering that's a little over two centuries after she died...and on the completely opposite hemisphere where she was known to traffic. I mean, there's stretching the truth to make your story work and then there's not even bothering to try. It was 2006! You had the internet, screenwriters! This was not a difficult thing to research and go "wait, we need to fix this!"
I wish that critical research failure was the absolute worst thing about this film...okay, it is, but it's not the only thing I can complain about. Besides the usual horror film problems of hokey acting and people just seeming not to give a crap about even trying to take anything seriously, you have the unrealistic and often just plain outright wrong portrayal of how video games work. For example, rumble pack technology is treated as a new thing...on a PS2 controller...when that's been a thing since the Nintendo 64...in 1998...eight years before this movie came out!
I wish that critical research failure was the absolute worst thing about this film...okay, it is, but it's not the only thing I can complain about. Besides the usual horror film problems of hokey acting and people just seeming not to give a crap about even trying to take anything seriously, you have the unrealistic and often just plain outright wrong portrayal of how video games work. For example, rumble pack technology is treated as a new thing...on a PS2 controller...when that's been a thing since the Nintendo 64...in 1998...eight years before this movie came out!
Also, voice responsive software. Which had been a thing in gaming since the Konami LaserScope in 1990. Granted, it was less commonplace, but it did exist and was hardly "next-gen", even as it is still a rarely used thing today outside of handhelds. The overall point with what is admittedly nitpicking is that fact that they could have done some research into it and actually bothered to bring some reality into it. Then again, these are the same people who tried to pass off the hilariously bad idea that Elizabeth Bathory opened a boarding school in the late 1800s, so that might be asking for a bit too much.
And on top of already having most of the problems a modern horror movie has - characters we don't care about, piecemeal character development for them, cheap jump scares used in place of any actual horror - it's also a PG-13 horror movie released under Disney's Hollywood Pictures production company - which ironically became defunct a year later. So, minimal actual bloodshed - and for a movie where Elizabeth "the Blood Countess" Bathory is involved, that's sad - minimal swearing, and no real nudity to speak of. Not that I'm a fan of the buckets of blood and nude virgins running around getting hacked apart by chainsaws, but at least in there I'm not bored to death by a bunch of twenty-somethings who can barely say "damn it" without the Sensor Board giving them dirty looks.
The movie is also plenty happy to ignore or outright lie about its own rules when the plot serves. It's established early on that Elizabeth Bathory cannot kill anyone until they die in the game, so the game eventually just decides to start playing itself, because oooooh, spooky! Roses are brought up as one of the only ways to protect oneself from her, but their frequency of effectiveness is all over the place, sometimes working so little that its pointless to carry one around and (in an instance later in the film) working so well as to completely break the rules that it itself has sent. And later on there's the always weird part of bringing things into the game world from the real world and vice versa.
On a related note, our hero Hutch goes from mourning the loss of his girlfriend October to hooking up with Abigail in the space of less than afternoon tea. And he's supposed to be the hero, folks!
This is really only a movie you can get enjoyment out of if you get together with some friends and laugh at how utterly dumb it is. I don't even know who its intended for otherwise. Video game fans? No. Horror movie fans? No. History buffs? Definitely not. It's something I'd almost be tempted to say would make a good Sci-Fi (or Syfy) Original Movie. Just dumb, lacking in any depth or substance, only memorable because of how utterly it failed in what it was trying to do. At least Mazes and Monsters - for all it's sensationalist nonsense - actually tried to vaguely get something right...
...alright, no, they didn't. But they didn't come so (potentially) close and then fail so very, very miserably in pretty much every regard. It's got a very neat concept and admittedly Elizabeth Bathory is really rather uncomfortably chilling, but that does not a good movie make and this one has just way, way too many problems that should have been addressed.
Stay Alive is now available from Hollywood Pictures, Spyglass Entertainment, and Endgame Entertainment on DVD.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
And on top of already having most of the problems a modern horror movie has - characters we don't care about, piecemeal character development for them, cheap jump scares used in place of any actual horror - it's also a PG-13 horror movie released under Disney's Hollywood Pictures production company - which ironically became defunct a year later. So, minimal actual bloodshed - and for a movie where Elizabeth "the Blood Countess" Bathory is involved, that's sad - minimal swearing, and no real nudity to speak of. Not that I'm a fan of the buckets of blood and nude virgins running around getting hacked apart by chainsaws, but at least in there I'm not bored to death by a bunch of twenty-somethings who can barely say "damn it" without the Sensor Board giving them dirty looks.
The movie is also plenty happy to ignore or outright lie about its own rules when the plot serves. It's established early on that Elizabeth Bathory cannot kill anyone until they die in the game, so the game eventually just decides to start playing itself, because oooooh, spooky! Roses are brought up as one of the only ways to protect oneself from her, but their frequency of effectiveness is all over the place, sometimes working so little that its pointless to carry one around and (in an instance later in the film) working so well as to completely break the rules that it itself has sent. And later on there's the always weird part of bringing things into the game world from the real world and vice versa.
On a related note, our hero Hutch goes from mourning the loss of his girlfriend October to hooking up with Abigail in the space of less than afternoon tea. And he's supposed to be the hero, folks!
This is really only a movie you can get enjoyment out of if you get together with some friends and laugh at how utterly dumb it is. I don't even know who its intended for otherwise. Video game fans? No. Horror movie fans? No. History buffs? Definitely not. It's something I'd almost be tempted to say would make a good Sci-Fi (or Syfy) Original Movie. Just dumb, lacking in any depth or substance, only memorable because of how utterly it failed in what it was trying to do. At least Mazes and Monsters - for all it's sensationalist nonsense - actually tried to vaguely get something right...
...alright, no, they didn't. But they didn't come so (potentially) close and then fail so very, very miserably in pretty much every regard. It's got a very neat concept and admittedly Elizabeth Bathory is really rather uncomfortably chilling, but that does not a good movie make and this one has just way, way too many problems that should have been addressed.
Stay Alive is now available from Hollywood Pictures, Spyglass Entertainment, and Endgame Entertainment on DVD.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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