While many have wisely dismissed STAY ALIVE for the utter lameness that it is, I’ve also read numerous reviews and horror message board posts from people complaining that they didn’t like the movie because it didn’t have enough blood and gore, or saying that they’d just wait to see it until the uncut version arrives on DVD later this year so that it’ll have all the blood and gore in it. This is why horror gets no respect: the assumption that all it’s about is being as gory as humanly possible. More blood and guts will not make STAY ALIVE a better movie. The characters are all stereotypes, some of the dialogue that comes out of their mouths is pitiful, and unless a director’s cut includes a lot of excised footage that explains the whole friggin’ plot of the film then no amount of gore is going to make the film any better.

I’d be a hypocrite to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional hack and slash. But what so many fail to understand - filmmakers and fans alike - it isn’t just how bloody a scene is but how effectively the bloody scene is executed within the context of the film. I just reviewed a fun killer Bigfoot flick called ABOMINABLE that features one of the best gross-out death scenes I’ve seen in a movie in ages. It works within the context of the scene, it works within the framework of the movie; it works because the film hadn’t just been relying on cheap kills as its sole reason to exist. If the rest of the film had been lousy then that film would have had a great kill surrounded by crap.

STAY ALIVE is crap, people. This… Is… CRAP!

STAY ALIVE is yet another horror movie that falls back on constantly trying to startle the audience with loud noises rather than working to produce any genuine scares. While there are a few moments where the film tries to develop a creepy atmosphere (with intermittent success), it still boils down to cheap scares. For example, the lead gets a knock at his door, looks through the peephole to see nobody, and then his friend pops his head up accompanied by the Foley artist slamming his arm on the keyboard with the volume cranked to the max. Much like the remake of WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, this is another film that overdoes this cheap scare technique to a grating degree. Hey, I can sneak up behind you and loudly pop a balloon behind your head to make you jump. After I've done it to you repeatedly for an hour and a half, not only are you probably going to stop jumping, you're probably going to get very annoyed. STAY ALIVE annoyed me.

So the lead’s best friend is a beta tester that was sent a promo copy of a new videogame called "Stay Alive," a survival horror game along the lines of Resident Evil and Fatal Frame where players create a character and send them running around a graveyard, creepy old mansion, etc. while being chased by ghoulie girls and a witchy noblewoman named Elizabeth Bathory. Die in the game and you die for real. Friend dies just as he did in the game, lead inherits some of his belongings that includes the beta copy of "Stay Alive," he and his gamer friends get together to play the game, and the ghostly witch from the game begins killing them off one-by-one. The cops thinks the lead is responsible for it all. Doing their own investigating leads the surviving friends to the game company’s residence, an old antebellum home that looks exactly like the one in the game. They have to destroy the witch’s corpse, which, according to legend, resides in the top of the tower she was walled up in alive as punishment for her crimes against humanity. Hey, look what’s behind the house – it’s a graveyard just like in the videogame with a big huge tower right smack dab in the center.

Forget about the PG-13 rating and the obviously edited down kills, this one takes a perfectly fine premise, does a decent job with it for about the first 15 minutes, and then spends the rest of the running time jerking the audience around. Much like ULTRAVIOLET, although not nearly as agonizing, STAY ALIVE left me walking out afterwards feeling ripped off.

STAY ALIVE DOESN'T MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE WHATSOEVER!

Who the hell created the video game? The movie never bothers to even try to explain it. We see a room in the house with game schematics all over the walls, clearly hinting at there being a human presence responsible for the game’s creation, programming, manufacturing, marketing, etc., and yet never do we meet such a person. Unless that whole part got edited out, are we’re supposed to believe that the ghost did it all? Are we to believe that the ghost alone went to the trouble of learning all the technical know-how needed to create a state-of-the-art videogame, went to all the trouble of emailing people about beta testing it, then mailing them a beta version, and, as evidenced by the astoundingly awful ending, she struck a deal with Sony, generated an entire print run of the game, shipped it out, got it on the market, and did promotional interviews with gaming magazines? For crying out loud, are we to believe the ghost of a 16th century witch did all this by herself with nothing but ghostly magic yet still needed a Sharpie to draw out game designs and schematics on earthly paper? Plotholes in movies are nothing new but the very premise the movie is founded on is a frackin' plothole!

When they decide to just stop playing the game, the game begins playing itself in order to kill them off so that her spirit can then go kill them off for real. There’s a scene where one character realizes this and yells out about how it isn't fair that the game isn't playing by its own rules. I felt like yelling that at the filmmakers. Not only does the witch in the game not play by the rules, neither do the people that made the damn movie. The whole movie is a cheat. Note to screenwriters: there is no cheat code for bad screenwriting; there is only bad screenwriting.

The witch from the game whose spirit is killing the players off is identified as Elizabeth Bathory, the infamous 16th century Hungarian mass murderess of noble blood who killed over 600 people and reportedly bathed in blood, leading to her nickname of  "The Blood Countess" that has become a permanent part of vampire lore. The movie, however, is set in the decidedly non-Hungarian city of New Orleans, pre-Katrina. How the hell did Elizabeth Bathory, the blood countess of Hungary, end up in Southern Louisiana? Explanation: there is none. The screenwriters came up with a story behind the game that sounds like something taken from a New Orleans ghost story (And believe me, New Orleans has no shortage of them) yet chose to shoehorn into it a real-life historical murderess who any horror fan should know is completely out of place in the role she’s been given. Bathory doesn't even have any motivation for her actions outside of just being evil and pissed off about being walled up in that tower - and possibly because the tower was then shipped from her native Hungary to The Big Easy.  We'll probably never know for sure.

But then what should one expect from a film that ends with the remaining survivors casually walking away relieved despite the fact that they are currently wanted for murder by the cops and have no credible proof to exonerate themselves. That’s not a minor plot point to be ignored.

Speaking of those characters, did just about everyone in this movie learn to act by watching HACKERS over and over? Judging by some of the performances in this film, as frightening as this may sound, Matthew Lillard seems to be one of the most influential actors of this generation. Look no further than Frankie Muniz; by the looks of his attire he decided to appear in this film while on the way to audition for the role of the villainous rich wigger in YOU GOT SERVED 2: THE SERVENING.

And for those of you hoping to see Muniz die horribly, I’m sad to report you’re out of luck. We see Frankie Muniz about to get killed. The game shows his character dead. He then shows up alive at the end with no discernable explanation as to how or why the ghost and the game would treat him as a fatality if he didn't actually die other than the screenwriters wanting to surprise us. Part of me honestly wonders if Muniz didn't pull some strings with the producers to keep his character from being killed off. I shudder at the notion that Muniz could have that much clout. The only middle I want to see Malcolm in is the middle of a puddle of his own blood.

There’s also blonde chick in the film that is without question one of the most worthless main characters I can recall ever seeing in a film. How worthless? It got to the point that I kept waiting for the movie to pull something like THE FACULTY and reveal that she was actually either the embodiment of Elizabeth Bathory or was the one responsible for the game’s creation, all this based solely on how unnecessary she was to the plot and how questionably she was introduced into it in the first place. Oh, wait, I forgot that the lead needed a girlfriend. Yeah, that justifies her. I guess.

The female sex is not represented well in STAY ALIVE. October - the name given to the goth chick character because, well, she’s a goth so she needs a goth-ish name – is so distraught after her brother is killed by Bathory running him down with a horse & buggy (You read that correctly!) that she blames the boring lead guy. "Why did you have to bring that game into our lives?" she says to him, apparently completely forgetting that it was actually her dead brother that pulled the game out of dead friend’s belongings and insisted they all get together and play it. Of course, this is also the same character that gets to utter the line, "Somebody just ran down my brother in a horse-drawn carriage. I want to find out who it is - and hurt them." Minutes later, she’ll get herself killed when she spies the Blood Countess in the window of a house under construction and runs in after her, forgetting that construction sites and the supernatural always make for a deadly combination.

And did you know that a full police report and crime scene photos of a murder still under investigation can be found online mere hours after the murder has been committed? Me either, but thank goodness it’s true. Otherwise, they characters would have never made it to level three, AKA the third act.

The problem with movies like STAY ALIVE, the reason why I just cannot cut it any slack, is that it’s another one of these movies that behaves with the mentality that the audience should just turn their brain off and enjoy, but the film isn’t willing to meet its audience halfway; instead hoping we're dumb enough not to notice or are apathetic enough not to care all the illogical and inconsistancies. Being mindless entertainment and having contempt for the audience are two entirely different things.

STAY ALIVE? More like stay away!