Movie Review Stay Alive

Stay Alive (2006) 

Directed by William Brent Bell 

Written by Matthew Peterman 

Starring Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Muniz, Adam Goldberg, Sophia Bush

Release Date March 24th, 2006 

Published March 24th, 2006

The horror genre has always been cheap and exploitative. To expect anymore from it is to be constantly disappointed. Sure, you occasionally get something like Dawn of The Dead that sneak past the guards of genre expectations and surprise you with incisive wit and social commentary but those experiences are few and far between.

More often you get cheap forgettable trash like Stay Alive, a serviceable, not too irritating exercise in teenage bloodletting that while you may not remember it long after you see it you at the very least won't wretch when it comes to Cinemax or Showtime in two or three months from now.

Little known actor Jon Foster stars in Stay Alive as Hutch, a twenty something slacker whose all consuming love of videogames is tested by the death of a close friend. A death that is eerily reminiscent of that friend's virtual death in an underground video game called Stay Alive.

The game is an historic gorefest based on the legend of a woman named Elizabeth Bathory aka The Blood Countess. She is said to have murdered hundreds of servant girls in the late 1800's and bathed in their virgin blood in order to keep herself youthful. If Ms. Bathory sounds far more interesting than anything else in Stay Alive you can understand why this film is  disappointing.

Hutch comes into possession of Stay Alive at his buddies funeral where he also meets a strange girl named Abigail (Samaire Armstrong) who also knew Hutch's late friend but is vague about the connection. She joins Hutch for a tribute to their late friend. With fellow gamers from a local internet café, Swink (Frankie Muniz), October (Sophia Bush), Phin (Jimmie Simpson) and Miller (Adam Goldberg), Hutch will play Stay Alive until they can't play anymore.

Little does anyone realize that you don't just play this video game you literally have to survive it. Like the video in The Ring or the website in Fear Dot Com, anyone that comes in contact with this video game has sealed their fate and will be picked off in the order of their passing inside the game.

The concept is unoriginal and not very inspired but that is the genre we are dealing with. Modern horror has little more on its mind than the kill and often that is enough to make these films passably entertaining. What dooms Stay Alive however is another scourge of the genre, the PG 13 rating.

With movies like The Grudge and When A Stranger Calls proving there is a viable moneymaking market in PG 13 horror we are now subject to bloodless horror cliches stripped of what makes us want to watch a horror movie in the first place, blood and sex.

Stay Alive is the latest example of the neutered horror genre. With plenty of dead bodies but little gore Stay Alive becomes a dull exercise in horror sanitized for the protection of children. The appeal of the genre has always been in the dark recesses of our minds where our id hides that part of ourselves that cannot resist the animalistic urge for blood.

The horror film appeals to base instinct, to titillation, and only the most skilled of the genre, people like George Romero or David Cronenberg can combine it with subtext and smarts. Most horror films have to settle for that base appeal to the darkness and allow us to wallow in that caveman enjoyment of blood, guts and beautiful naked woman.

Stripped of that, a film like Stay Alive is simply boring. Like watching someone else play a video game and never giving you a turn. There is very little to hold your interest, especially with a concept that is so derivative and unoriginal as a killer video game.

A question for Frankie Muniz. Why are you in this movie? Muniz is not exactly a big star. His TV show Malcolm In The Middle is limping to the finish line and his Cody Banks film series is not likely to continue. However on name recognition alone he is the biggest star in this movie and yet he plays a supporting role to a guy who's biggest role to date was the gas station attendant in Terminator 3? Okay, Jon Foster has had bigger roles but he is nowhere near as well known as Muniz whose career takes a big step backward in Stay Alive.

Of all the disappointments in Stay Alive however, maybe the biggest is writer-director William Brent Bell who shows off far more talent behind the camera than the film deserves. Bell's occasional directorial flourishes make you wonder why he put so much talent in service of such a forgettable little film. Bell's writing could use a great deal of work but as a director he seems to have a good deal of talent.

Someday William Brent Bell may make a serious name for himself as a director for hire on big budget features where a strong producer like Joel Silver can help him focus on simply making the film and forget about trying to be a writer slash director. As the script for Stay Alive, co-written with fellow first timer Matthew Peterman, shows, Bell simply doesn't have the writing chops.

Stay Alive is yet another forgettable teenage slasher flick designed more as a studio ATM than as an entertaining horror film. I'm not recommending it, hell I can barely remember having seen it myself.