Malcolm in the Media

Stay Alive

Directed by William Brent Bell
Written by William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterman
Starring Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Muniz, Sophia Bush, Jimmi Simpson, and Adam Goldberg

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, I'm not a big fan of this new style of gotcha! horror. By gotcha! I mean this: since John Carpenter's original Halloween , horror films have relied increasingly on startling rather than actually scaring their viewers. How does this work? Have a character move through a scene, maybe set up a little tension like something is going to happen, then have a blurry mass jump suddenly out from the screen at the audience with a sound effect like a Bessemer steel plant blasting through the cinema's Dolby sound system.

It has the same effect as having a Mack truck brake suddenly behind you while walking a deserted country road. It doesn't even matter what jumps out at you. It could even be a fake gotcha! : instead of a monster or a slasher, just a cat hops out or a book falls off a shelf. You could do this in the middle of When Harry Met Sally and startle the shit out of the audience. The key factor here is the scare is achieved with film technique rather than with real story or character development. Instead of tapping real horror, it's a cheap trick.

This is ok if the film uses the technique in the service of a good story and deft direction. Halloween itself is an example of this, as is the end sequence to Carrie . Too much of this startling and you end up with an insulting mess (see “The People vs. The Amityville Horror Remake”).

While Stay Alive is more than a little guilty of using the gotcha!, it does have an interesting premise at its heart. It must be interesting or they wouldn't have used it for Videodrome, The Ring , Fear dot com and a dozen other recent films. You could call it haunted technology, and it gets at our anxiety about the increasing number of gadgets that we dedicate our lives to but don't really understand (personally, I still don't get compact discs – all that sound comes from…light?!) In Stay Alive the tech in question is computer games and the search for the ultimate gaming experience.

The film's main characters, Jon Foster (white-bread lead), Frankie Muniz (of TV's Malcolm in the Middle ), Sophia Bush (as the goth chick), and Jimmi Simpson (as the new Matthew Lillard) discover and play a game called “Stay Alive” left behind by their dead friend Loomis. The game is an underground title or perhaps one stolen by Loomis, implying that it is too brutal for public sale. The back-story of the game is based on the life and after-life of the 17 th century noblewoman, Elizabeth Bathory, often called “The Blood Countess” and well-known to any fan of horror. Her real-life history and predilection for bathing in the blood of young girls to retain eternal youth, with its vampiric, sado-masochistic, and lesbian overtones, has been the launching point for many horror films, most notably Countess Dracula , starring Ingrid Pitt (yummmm).

We as the audience already know that Loomis was killed by the game itself. Hell, we know this from the movie's poster: “You Die In The Game - You Die For Real.” So when a person plays and is killed, they then die for real in the ways identical to how they died in the game – even if that means being run down by a 17 th century carriage. But the movie's characters don't know this, and so they willingly recite a “prayer” as instructed by the opening frame of the game that casts a spell and makes the player's real life correspond with the events of the game. When they have played enough for the night and pause the game, the game keeps going, killing off the one player who died in the game. The movie then moves into suspenseful mystery mode as the players gradually put things together and realize that they have to actually win the game or die.

The movie has been panned as idiotic, predictable, silly, boring, and clichéd. Some of this is true. The characters are flat, with the exception of Muniz'. And this can be attributed more to Muniz' ability to play this kind of geeky, exasperated teen than to the writing itself. The film also has characters do things that were always stupid, but since Scream should be legislated against: women hear noises and go off to investigate up darkened stairwells or in abandoned houses. Then there's the weird goth girl who happens to lay her hands on the occult book that will provide just the right info at just the right time. That one is almost as overused as the Crichtonesque team-of-experts.

But real tension is maintained in the film. Because the game continues playing – and killing – even if they try to pause it, the characters must do their detective work into the game, its makers and The Blood Countess at the same time as the they keep playing to stay alive. It's not too surprising who lives and who dies, but the interesting imagery in the game sequences keeps you wondering how.

And at the risk of saying too much about what the characters discover, The Blood Countess proves to be much more than just back-story. Her demonic use of the game is intricate and chilling and provides a new chapter to her history. One might even find a sub-text about nerdy computer boys and their fear of women as dangerous blood-suckers. The story of the Countess is also mixed with the Bloody Mary myth in the film's use of mirror imagery. After all, a video-game is a kind of hi-tech mirror where we chant Bloody Mary's name and see our fears come to life. Usually the distance provided by the game keeps us safe. Not in Stay Alive. So despite being a film with many flaws typical of the teen horror genre and a title that evokes the Bee Gees, Stay Alive provides more fun without offending your intelligence than most critics would have you believe.

by Nemo Swift
web-only review