Stay Alive (DVD)

Borrowing heavily from The Grudge, Saw and The Ring film franchises — with just a touch of flower power and Blood Countess legendry thrown in — Stay Alive is another in a long line of uninspired horror/videogame movies. (There is a bit of a twist; in this case, the movie came before the game.)

After the strange death of a reclusive friend (Milo Ventimiglia), a group of young twenty-somethings living in pre-Katrina New Orleans find themselves in possession of Stay Alive, a violent videogame he was Beta-testing.

Jon Foster plays Hutch O'Neill, the most level-headed of the gamers, and what passes as our hero. He's got a thing for the newest member of the group, the mysterious Abigail (an out-of-sorts Samaire Armstrong). She's friends with bickering siblings October (an almost unrecognizable Sophia Bush) and Phineas Bantum (an exceedingly irritating Jimmi Simpson). Frankie Muniz has a major role as a techie who likes to wear an ugly green banker's visor — as if plainly proclaiming he only took this turkey for the money.

Our group of rocket scientists soon discover that the game's villain is Elizabeth Bathory, a 17th century noblewoman known as the Blood Countess, who moved from Eastern Europe to New Orleans (never mind that New Orleans didn't exist until over 100 years after her death) and wreaked havoc all over the Crescent City. After playing the game when they know they shouldn't (what's a little death among friends?) the group realizes that once they die in the game, they die for real. As their numbers begin dropping, the Countess gains strength and seems to be able to change the rules (that's the only thing I can guess, as the characters just start dying haphazardly, or not dying when it seems they should).

Everything about Stay Alive is so ghastly, it's hard to know where to begin the criticisms…

Otherwise talented actors seem adrift in a sea of bizarre dialogue that's a mix of hip-hop slang, 40s hardboiled, techno-geek, and Briticisms. The usually beautiful Bush looks awful, thanks to appalling cinematography, hair and makeup, while Armstrong, who was quite good on HBO's Entourage, is "acting" so hard in every scene — grimacing, pacing, eye-brow knitting, and nail biting — that you can almost see her sweating bullets. Simpson portrays a character who is supposed to be annoying, but he plays it to the hilt of unbearable and unbelievable. Every single actor, many of them veterans in the smaller parts, has trouble with their dialogue; when these guys can't even deliver their lines with a big brown truck, you know it has to be the fault of the script.

Some of the dialogue scenes could possibly have been salvaged, had they been edited down. (Say it quick, before anyone notices you have no idea what you're saying!) The dialogue goes on and on with idiotic lines like this: "I need you to find the back door" Reply: "I'm not really sure where that is." Ummm… maybe in the back? The cast doesn't just say inane things, they do dumb things also. For instance, when one character is trapped inside a house that's under construction, her friends try desperately to break down a seemingly armored door when clearly just around the corner there is nothing but beams covered with plastic sheeting.

Perhaps the worst, most amateurish work on this production is by the cinematographer, whom I will spare naming. The shots have no sense of composition at any time; the young actors all look sick and sallow due to extremely shoddy lighting and unflattering camera angles; the Steadicam shots are shaky at best; and focus goes in and out at random.

One thing I can say in the movie's favor is that it's so bad it's good. It's never boring — not because it's at all scary (tons of boo-scares and throw-away, suspense-free death scenes), but because you just can't believe what you're seeing.

Extras on the Unrated Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition):

Visual Effects Reel – a one-minute bombardment of nonsensical imagery from the movie, set to an appallingly cheesy rock/pop song.

Commentary by longtime friends and partners, William Brent Bell (writer/director) and

Matthew Peterman (writer/producer) — begin their commentary with the words "The horrible secrets nobody wants to hear…" True, but some of us have to listen to these things as a part of our job, so some effort to make it entertaining would have been appreciated! The Stay Alive commentary is not actually a bad one, but it has a lot of silence gaps and the speakers are far too self-congratulatory, considering the outcome.

Bell and Peterman do talk a lot about how they only had 25 days to shoot the movie, and had to cut a lot of corners. That explains a few things, but so does the fact that production was held up for two hours one day while an argument ensued about the length of Milo Ventimiglia's beard. If production had to be held up, it should have been spent improving the script or giving the DP a few lessons in the use of fill-lighting.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson