Title: Stay Alive

Running Length: 85 min

Directed By: Willian Brent Bell

The Hell is it About? A video game mysteriously surfaces that kills people in the real world the same way they die in-game. Basically the kind of story a guard at a hospital would come up with to scare a retard out of the recreation room after hours.

Spolieriffic: I wish I could ruin something about this movie for you with a spoiler, but there is literally nothing I could say that you couldn't guess or find at the bottom of a septic tank.

Notes: It ran in major markets for an average of three days. No advanced screenings were given to critics; all advertising stopped the minute the movie was released. Jack Thomson thought this film was a documentary.

Review: A group of friends finds an "Underground" copy of a game that has yet to be released. They play and one by one they die in real life just as they do in the game. The lead character "Hutch" manages to figure out the pattern, and like a true slacker, in the last 15 minutes of the movie goes about trying to stop it. Luckily the Police realize how contrived this concept is and apparently wash their hands of more than 5 murders (including the death of a police officer) to just simply disappear from the plot at an arbitrary point.

As a gamer, I virulently protest the notion that Goth's can be considered gamers, or anything but failures.

This film is so bad it makes diarrhea splattered on a lamp seem like an Oscar winner (no offense to Crash). The director did every single thing possible to piss me off, from not explaining where the game actually came from, to breaking the "rules" of the movie they set up, to including a Goth in their film named October. I just want to say, Fuck you William Brent Bell, I hope you die in a building collapse. The biggest problem I have with this movie was that everything is very poorly explained. For example there's a certain point where one of the characters is walking down the street, sees something mysterious inside some random house, goes inside, and promptly dies. There is another instance where they skip over the fact that the game (if paused or turned off) will turn back on causing the character, and connected actor to die, and of course it happens. Conversely, they have a sequence where Frankie Muniz's character dies in the game and remains alive regardless. So in the course of about 10 minutes you see people die without them dying in game, and then people not dying when they die in game. This makes you care even less about what's going on, and is all the more reason William Brent Bell should have a hammer dropped on his nuts shortly before they are immolated.

Aside from the lame story, the acting is worthy of a community college drama exercise where someone manages to fall off the stage, break their forearm and shit themselves. I wont go into why the actors aren't believable as gamers, people from New Orleans, or worthy of ever acting again, but I will say that if the writer/director had ever played a game in his entire life he forgot every single detail about it before this movie was made.

It may be a little blurry, but this is in fact a picture of inside the theatre, mere minutes before showtime, during opening weekend.

Yet another disappointment (a resource this film has a surplus of) was finding out where this haunted game came from. I spent the entire movie hoping we would see the origin of this mal-content video game, and of course when we do, it, like William Brent Bell's penis, fails to satisfy. There were no servers, no overworked producers, no designers tearing their hair out, not a single tester. Apparently, an evil countess who lived in the late 17th century and killed the students of a grammar school created this game. That's right an evil curse brought this game to life, and murdered a handful of people, no millions of dollars in budget, or motion capturing, or compatibility testing, just plain old curse. Here is my problem with this concept: If all it took to make a game were a blood curse, and the deaths of a few slackers, Electronic Arts would be neck deep in gore. If it saved them that much money and manpower, you be lucky to see next year's Madden with under three dozen fatalities on EA's hands. In fact I bet after Atari released Driv3r, they probably found out through experience that murdering random gamers, made just about as much money as selling Driv3r. I guarantee you gaming companies have pursued black magic as a possibility and, like this movie, have failed.

Towards the end, the "hero" and his unearned helpless maiden, manage to kill the evil countess who lives in the mansion the game is modeled after. He manages to melt the witch with her own reflection, and if the plot wasn't filled with enough bland pratfalls and poor logic, the reflection in question comes off of a very sparkly alienware laptop. What happens after that? In the rest of the filler before the credits roll, we see that at a local game shop, they receive a shipment of the "Stay Alive" game that is being put on shelves while sinister music plays. Complete with box art, colorful packaging, and it even has a cardboard cut out on the shelf they are being placed upon. As bad as William Brent Bell deserves to be jabbed in the spine with a rail spike, and as bad as he is at telling stories, I think were getting the hint that the murders will continue, even after the curse was clearly broken. If the game is going to continue to kill without the witch, then why the fuck did we watch the movie. Its like reading the chapter of Jesus' life when he took a year off a college left Judea and worked at a bookstore, NO ONE FUCKING CARES. Also if there was box art, (as opposed to the bare disc the original victims played) and cardboard cut outs, and people buying the game there HAD to be some advertising involved there. And granted if the games were conjured up that takes care of production, but someone had to negotiate a sale price for the games, someone had to decide to purchase this game from somewhere, decide how much shelf space it would get, and hit a minimum order to get the doofy looking cardboard cut out. It arrived in a box; someone had to pay for shipping from somewhere. Too many unanswered questions. Probably the most painful plot hole in this parade of narrative swiss cheese, is that the "countess" is supposed to be the ghost of 17th century Countess Elizabeth Bathory. If anyone bothers to look that up she was countess OF TRANSYLVANIA. Listed on the Stay Alive website is a passage that says "-she was declared a menace by her family and condemned to live walled up inside her castle, driven insane by solitude, for the rest of her days. It is assumed she died there - but in STAY ALIVE it appears Elizabeth's spirit was able to escape and set up a new lair across the oceans in another famed haunt of vamps and vampires: the city of New Orleans." This movie pulled a pretty hard "Schiavo", it was brain dead before it got off the ground. Base your story about a ghost translocating across the atlantic, building a house, and developing a video game. Your standard, ghoul comes to America, starts a family, and wants to kill people scenario. I can only guess that Willian Brent Bell is a smooth smooth talker and can suck some mean producer head, because let us not forget he got funding for this piece of shit.

Least Favorite Moment: There is a part where Frankie Muniz's character is playing the game, at the same time as the male lead is walking around the mansion the game is modeled after. They discover that the actions in the game are directly linked to the real world. So Frankie (I shit you not) helps the hero out in a couple instances by unlocking some doors in real time, and providing a crowbar in a crucial situation. Wow, I feel filthy for having conveyed that idea to you.

Second Least Favorite: The goth talking. . . at all.

Rating: 0/7 Hills - To date the lowest rating I have given anything on the entire website ever. I would rate being raped by an anthropomorphic churro that caught fire better than this movie.