Review of Stay Alive (2006) by W00Fw00F — 24 Mar 2006

[***SPOILERS***] If you've seen the television ads for this dreadful flick, you've already seen the best it has to offer. Don't waste your money on the price of a ticket. "Stay Alive" is poor film making at its worst.

We're talking about one scene in which a boom mike is visible, and another in which a profile shot of an actress reveals a large orange object (an earplug, I think) in her left ear. It's THAT kind of bad.

It's the kind of bad film making in which characters have knowledge of conversations that took place while they were elsewhere. Phineas, for instance, has been out driving while the rest of the cast has been talking about how people are dying when they die in "the game," yet when he receives a call on his cell phone responds that he'll be alright because "That's right! I haven't died in the game!" It's the kind of bad film making that puts a notorious Elizabethan-era mass murderer (Elizabeth Bathory) in New Orleans and changes the name of a very famous book about witch hunting, "Maleus Malificarum," to "Maleus Demonium" but forgets to change the title of the book that a character is holding in her hands WHILE she is telling someone else about the contents of the book.

It's the kind of bad film making wherein the performances are so paper-thin that, clearly, if this were bad in any sort of memorable way (instead of merely being sloppy and formulaic), Frankie Muniz would surely be up for a Razzie for his stilted, twitchy, downright annoying performance.

It's the kind of bad that has the main weapons of the oh-so-horrible ghostly antagonist turn out to be a pair of scissors and a horse-drawn carriage that can be vaporized by throwing a rose at it.

It's the kind of bad that has a main character suddenly blurt out her entire life story while riding in a van with no apparent provocation, and her story has absolutely no connection to anything in the rest of the movie at all.

None. WHY? Clearly, the writers were unable to string together anything coherent here. To make matters worse, the film takes itself seriously yet fails utterly to deliver on the gore. There isn't a single good scare in the film; it's all hand-on-the-shoulder, bump-in-the-night stuff here.

In fact, we never really see a death scene other than one or two knife strokes. Most of the time, the lights go out, there's a scream, and suddenly another one's bit the dust. Either that or a quick cutaway.

Truly gutless stuff here. No doubt the producers realized that nobody over the age of 14 would buy into this pablum and decided to go after a PG-13 rating. I've heard stories told around campfires that were ten times as scary as this mess.

Even the special effects look cartoonish, and real video games have better graphics than most of what we see in "Stay Alive." "Stay Alive" is bad in every conceivable way. The patently predictable ending of this lurching wreck of a movie leaves open the possibility of a sequel, of course.

I doubt there will be one, though, because I can't imagine anyone wanting to sit through another two hours of something as bad as this. We're talking "Darkness Falls" and "Fear Dot Com" bad stuff here.

Save your money. The most frightening thing about "Stay Alive" is the price of admission.