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Printer-Friendly ModeAnother horror flick fails to Stay Alive
March 27, 2006 —
Stay Alive is another teen horror movie. How long have these movies been going on, anyway? It's like a new one of them comes out every week, and there is no way to differentiate them from each other.
If the first Friday the 13th movie was still playing and advertised as new every week, would anyone even know the difference? This one advertises itself with a special feature to attempt to stand out, though: it involves a video game which then becomes reality for the people who play it. Despite what the makers of the movie may have thought, this is still old news.
This is really a rehashing of the same type of idea The Ring used, which itself was an American version of a Japanese horror movie. I continually hear about the merits of Japanese and European horror films, which begs the question of why they don't simply release them over here for wide releases. Perhaps people are too lazy to read subtitles? If so, that is a shame.
The tool used here is one in which people are exposed to a piece of film, or a book, in earlier stories, and after viewing the material, supernatural and bad things begin to happen to them. The fact that Stay Alive employs video games says nothing of originality, only that there is such a thing as video games, and the makers of the movie decided to use them here.
The game the characters play is a sort of horror/survival game, in the vein of such real games as Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Fun fact: these games are scarier than this movie, and the characters have at least as much depth.
What happens is that when the characters play the game, and the characters they are playing (who manage to look almost just like them) die, the person dies shortly after in real life in exactly the same fashion. One of the characters spouts off on how this is possible due to research about perceived reality, but thankfully this is one loose end of the plot that wasn't explored, because I didn't really want to hear what someone who wrote a movie about games becoming real thinks about perceived reality.
The game and the movie are grounded on the deeds of Elizabeth Bathory. In fact, the object of the game is to do away with her lingering spirit. Elizabeth Bathory is indeed a terrifying historical figure. She was a psychotically vain woman in 16th Century Transylvania who believed that she could keep her youthful appearance by bathing in the blood of young girls. Not everyone knows about Elizabeth Bathory, and her story indeed would make for a much more frightening movie than this if done well.
How seriously did the makers of this movie take this project? Looking at the list of characters may be a clue: Hutch MacNeil, Swink Sylvania, October and Phineas Bantum, Loomis Crowley. Apparently it's clever to give a character the last name Sylvania in a movie grounded in Transylvanian history, and to name a character Phineas in a movie where a spike is driven through a head.
Stay Alive is a little too silly for its own good and doesn't really possess any distinguishing qualities. This is proof that a gimmick, in this case using video games as the base of the story (and maybe allowing Frankie Muniz to take part in some way), doesn't make for a good movie. Also, putting a Transylvanian estate in America is pretty messed up. Hopefully someone will step forward with a quality horror movie in Hollywood soon, because this is getting old.