Product Description
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This pop culture-laden fright-fest takes the legend of
Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary and relocates it in the
inherently creepy locale of New Orleans. The usual cast of motley
and none-too-bright teenagers is assembled and attached to quirky
names--smartass Phineas (Jimmi Simpson) and his Goth-girl sister,
October (Sophia Bush), hunky protagonist Hutch (Jon Foster), and
tech-head Swink (Frankie Muniz), to name a few--and they all have
one thing in common: the love of gaming. When Hutch's best friend
Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia) is a victim in a violent massacre,
Hutch ends up with the game he was playing just before he died.
Called 'Stay Alive', the game is technically illegal and Hutch
and his friends can't resist booting it up. The game resurrects
the Countess, who centuries ago was walled up in her tower when
her crimes were discovered (she is said to have brutally murdered
650 servant girls and bathed in their blood). Now, she is
fulfilling her vow to return to reassume her reign of terror.
This time, however, her victims are gamers who will die in the
same way in life as they do in the game. The video game itself
becomes a character in the film, showing off excellent 3-D,
cinematic effects, and creating an effectively spooky atmosphere
with a memorable, if derivative, aesthetic. The gore never gets
too brutal but the e tactics are adept, while the Countess
herself, with pasty skin and high-necked red dress, is a movie
monster worthy of canonisation.
From .co.uk
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Straight from the set-'em-up and knock-'em-down school
of teen-horror filmmaking, Stay Alive gives literal meaning to
the parental lament, "Those games will kill you someday." Not
that you'll find any parents in this gimmicky thriller set in New
Orleans; they're conspicuously absent when Hutch (Jon Foster) and
his hardcore gamer pals discover "Stay Alive," a mysterious
next-generation computer game that has a nasty way of
precipitating mayhem, horror, and death. If your character dies
in the game, you're doomed to die in identically grisly fashion
in real life. So, just don't play the game, right? WRONG. This
being a teen horror flick with a screenplay that makes no sense
whatsoever, the gamer pals (including victim #2, Hutch's boss,
played with game-addicted fervor by Adam Goldberg) obsessively
investigate the game and its creepy Ring-like origins in the 17th
century murder spree of a woman known as "The Blood Countess."
Because movies like this are best viewed on a steady diet of Pop
Tarts and Ritalin, Jimmi Simpson earns top honors as the gamer
pal with the creepiest behavior, and Malcolm in the Middle fans
will enjoy the presence of Frankie Muniz as a gamer geek whose
primary fashion statement consists of grimy T-shirts and green
plastic poker-visors. While not nearly as fun or clever as the
Final Destination movies, Stay Alive delivers a few good deaths
while blatantly stealing most of its horror highlights from Ju-On
and other Japanese horror hits. It's junk from start to finish,
but its target audience of mallrats and gamers (especially those
with attention deficit disorder, which helps to ignore the plot
holes) won't mind a bit.--Jeff Shannon