Holy mackerel. How bad can a scare-free horror movie get? Can it possibly be worse than that dreadful remake of the Fog? Well, Stay Alive is that and much, much less. Though Korean and Japanese filmmakers seem to have little difficulty in freaking out film audiences with haunted mirrors and mobile phones and VHS cassettes, this cod gothic never manages to convince that a cursed computer game can replicate grisly murders in the real world. (“You die in the game, you dies for real” as the tagline succinctly puts it.) Come to think of it, the real world – a place where nerds do online battle with ridiculously pretty gothlets – isn’t all that convincing here either.
Instead, obsessive gaming is rendered as a hip and happening subculture where the hot chicks swing by for a turn on the joystick. At least I think it is. Some of the performances here are so poor we can’t be sure if the dialogue was originally written in speech or dolphin sounds. The game itself, purportedly a beta version (but that’s no excuse), would have looked antiquarian in the age of Donkey Kong. But this is still less perplexing than the plot. The murderous disc, it transpires, is the work of the dastardly Elizabeth Bathory.
Now wait just a minute. What is an ancient European noblewoman doing writing computer games in contemporary New Orleans? And wasn’t the poor countess just a victim of patriarchal propaganda? What’s going on?
You can’t help but feel terrible for Frankie Muniz, lately of Malcolm In The Middle. If he insists on signing up for unintentionally hilarious drivel like this, his film career really will prompt the dread legend ‘Game Over’.