It would appear to this reviewer that the once varied horror genre seems to now be stuck in only two categories, repeating themselves in a continuous loop. The categories I speak of are either carnage-filled bloodfests that exist only to repulse (Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek), or overly sanitized to the point of ridiculousness schlock flicks that are designed simply to steal the allowance money of 14-year-old girls looking for a chance to scream (When a Stranger Calls). Stay Alive falls under the second category and does very little to buck the recent trend. First-time director and co-writer William Brent Bell has given us a film so incoherent and tactless that it plays out like the first draft of a script being projected on the screen. The movie carelessly throws logic and plot coherency to the wind, creating an experience so baffling that people are going to be too busy figuring stuff out to be scared. (Not that there's much in this film to be afraid of in the first place.) Throw in some laughably bad dialogue and a talentless cast, and you've got the makings for one instantly forgettable time at the theater.

The plot revolves around a horror video game called "Stay Alive" that supposedly kills the person who plays it shortly after their character dies in the game. (I say supposedly because thanks to the magic of the film's PG-13 rating, we don't get to see anyone die, and the editing is so sloppy, we often can't tell what's going on anyway. You'll just have to take my word for it.) Its most recent victims include a young man (Milo Ventimiglia) and his friends who all wind up dying the same way their characters did in the game. At the funeral, our hero Hutch (Jon Foster) inherits the young man's collection of video games, as they were childhood friends in the past. One of those games, unsurprisingly, is the deadly one. Guess which one Hutch and his buddies decide to break out when they all get together for a gaming session? The small group of buddies includes obnoxious geek Swink (Frankie Muniz), love interest Abigail (Samaire Armstrong), the whiny and annoying October (Sophia Bush), her equally annoying brother Phineus (Jimmi Simpson), and Hutch's video game-obsessed boss from work (Adam Goldberg). The group is awed by the game at first, but as they slowly start ending up being murdered one after another the same way their characters are killed in the game, Hutch begins to suspect that things are not what they seem, and that there may be a connection between the death of his childhood friend and his gaming group dropping like flies.

While this concept seems simple enough on the surface, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. There's something to do with some psychotic woman who killed a bunch of children in the past, and now her spirit somehow lives on inside the video game, so she can continue her murder spree. Don't bother trying to make sense out of that. The movie doesn't bother, so why should you? We never learn where this game came from, who made it, or how it somehow contains the power to call forth murderous spirits of centuries-old psycho killers. And just how does this video game cause Hutch and his friends to start hallucinating demonic figures appearing in mirrors and other such cheap scare tactics? Those would all be questions you would expect to be answered, and the movie teases us in making us think Hutch and his friends are going to try to track down the company that makes the game, but this plot point is almost immediately abandoned, and they instead go to a haunted Plantation mansion where CGI video game monsters literally come out of the walls. The movie is a nearly interminable 85 minutes of nonstop incoherency. The characters are paper thin and idiotic, and instead of trying to actually scare you, the movie decides to annoy you by assaulting your senses.

Yes, instead of letting the fear grow from the story itself, the movie decides to cheat and throw in numerous "jump scares", even when there's no need for one. This is usually accomplished by a rapidly quick cut of a random image accompanied by a high-pitched scream, sometimes right in the very middle of a scene. The movie also employs the age-old trick of hoping to make the audience jump by magnifying every sound effect. Cell phones ring at an almost deafening volume, and even the built-in vibration feedback of a video game controller has the ability to literally echo down a hallway. I've grown increasingly tired of these kind of tricks, and the fact that 75% of the film is based around intensified noise in a futile attempt to frighten us quickly grew old with me. Don't expect any actual scares from the movie itself, however. There's no blood (other than a bizarre sequence where a computer keyboard starts oozing the stuff), and there is no actual violence depicted on screen. This film was obviously edited from an R to a PG-13 in a vain attempt to sucker in a wider audience, but it just doesn't work, because the editing is so sloppy that we often can't see what's happening. We get a couple shots of dark figures darting about in the background before the victim meets his demise, then we either see him or her scream before the camera cuts away, or the camera suddenly suffers from a seizure in order to cover up the gruesome act that we're supposed to be watching. The film's storyline is confusing enough, we don't need sloppy editing to add insult to injury. The final nail in the coffin is the ending where not only does a character seemingly return from the dead without a word of explanation, but it also contains a final scene that doesn't make a lick of sense. While it's common for most horror movies to end on a note that leaves the audience to believe it's not over yet, this film contains one of the worst endings of its kind I've seen in a long time.

With the characters so underdeveloped that the brief descriptions I gave of them in the earlier plot synopsis are actually deeper than the way they're depicted in the film itself, the performances are bound to suffer. Stay Alive does not disappoint here. The actors have nothing to work with, except that they all like to get together and play video games, so they're left floundering about on the screen before the movie has the mercy to kill most of their characters off. The prime offender is young TV star, Frankie Muniz, who gives a performance so howlingly bad that he ought to be up for one of the infamous Razzie awards come next year. The rest of the cast is completely one-note in their performances. We've got the "hero", the "good girl", the "jerk", the "tough girl with the nice personality", the "geek"...These aren't people, they're walking stereotypes with only their physical features to mainly differentiate them. (Muniz' character, for example, wears a sun visor hat backwards.) The film can't even afford us the luxury of a decent monster. The film's villain, a murderous ghoul known as "The Blood Countess", appears for such brief periods of time and does so little when she's actually on screen that she may as well not even be in the movie at all.

Is there anything I can recommend about Stay Alive? Well, the pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans setting was kind of unexpected, but the setting was put to much better use in last year's The Skeleton Key. And, I must admit, whoever designed the video game for this movie seemed to know a lot more about horror atmosphere than anyone involved with this movie. It's not exactly a game I would race out and buy myself, but I was impressed that it actually turned out to be semi-decent considering the quality of the film that surrounds it. Other than that, Stay Alive is a completely disposable little piece of trash. It's been a pretty tough time for horror fans. Here's to hoping next month's Silent Hill (which, despite the fact it's based on a video game, looks extremely promising) can help lift my spirits.

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