Jamie
I have literally been waiting years for this moment. Stay Alive is one of a relatively small set of films that have me stop in my tracks and say, “Hold up… that qualifies?” These are major releases that are so crazy in concept that it’s a real wonder that they appear to have made no cultural impact. So little that I assumed they were straight-to-video. The year was 2006 and a film came out about a killer video game and I… have no recollection of it. It wasn’t even a massive bomb. If anything it was a modest success. Anyway, I always have to take a moment and celebrate when one of these films finally breaks through BMT rulez and finds a spot in a cycle. Now it just has to live up to the lofty standards (pun actually not intended, believe it or not) that The Loft set.
To recap, Loomis Crowley and his girlfriend, Sarah, are cutting it up with a new spooky video game. Even spookier, after the game ends they are killed just like their characters were. Hutch, Loomis’ friend, and Abigail, Sarah’s friend, meet at the funeral. Hutch ends up being given the game they were playing, Stay Alive. In memory of Loomis and Sarah, he and a bunch of friends get together to play the game. They are duly spookified and Hutch’s boss is killed in the game… and dies. Stay Alive! Like in Tarot, the police are like “so how many people in your lives have died in the last week?” Already pretty much knowing what’s happening they begin to research the subject of the game: Countess Bathory. One of the friends ignores the warnings and plays… and dies. Stay Alive! One of the detectives ignores the warnings and plays… and dies. Stay Alive! Hutch and the gang head to the plantation where the game is set and try to subdue the Countess’ ghost. They realize that the game can play itself (horseshit lore) and also that one of them can play and the help provided appears in real life (weird, but I’ll allow it). A climactic showdown occurs where all the very important game lore is used to kill the spirit. THE END. (Or is it? (They desperately want that to not be the case)).
Franchise Man has no right to comment on this movie until it unexpectedly becomes a franchise twenty or thirty years after the original. But… if he were to comment he would say that the rulez and lore in this movie are a travesty. The game plays itself? The game… just can kill you without you actually playing the game. Uh… I thought the tagline was Play It To Death. Operative word there being “play” as in play the game. It looks like shit and is total nonsense, so I don’t accept the claim on wikipedia that this is some cult classic. You know what would have made it a classic? More creative video game kills and making it so that to stop the curse they must, you know, play the game. I actually need them to make a sequel to right the wrongs of the past.
Hot Take Clam Bake! I’m brave enough to say it. I don’t think that video game was even haunted. I think there was a cool as hell serial killer out there pulling all the strings. A Jigsaw type character who was never stopped because they thought it was the video game all along. Some dopey ghost did all that? No way, man. It was this Jigsaw character trying to teach you all a lesson about life. In fact, I think it was actually Jigsaw. I also think Jigsaw is real and not a character in a movie franchise. How’s that for hot? Maybe I am Jigsaw. Hot enough for yah? Hot Take Temperature: Jigsaw
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *gif of me playing a spooky video game and getting all spookified* Let’s go!
The Good? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. I mean, is there anything? I don’t think so. Not since I learned that Anna from The O.C. has turned into a religious film actor.
The Bad? Everything. The acting is bad, especially the main guy. Frankie Muniz is doing something, but that something probably made more sense when he was an actor instead of a racecar driver. And it isn’t a scary film. The only thing it really has going for it is that idea that it is a killer video game film.
The BMT? Hmmm. I think it is. Partially because if you watch the Director’s Cut they have a bunch of stuff in there which look wildly different than the rest of the film because they had to get it (seemingly) off of the B roll or something. The film is such a terrible, and yet unique version of that 00s horror that it almost inevitably will be a film we’d return to in the future.
A little bit of a curve ball on the AI journey here. I did a good number of experiments, which at some point I’ll continue, but I also was curious whether I could use it to get Rotten Tomatoes scores for a list of IMDb links. In other words … could it genuinely replace something annoying that I tend to just arduously scrape? Let’s do this naively. I used the Google Gemini “grounded” search, and decided on something straightforward: given the top 100 1980 films IMDb links, could it return a dictionary of all 100 rotten tomatoes scores? Naive answer: helllllllll naw. Well, that is a little unfair, it seems to have a hard limit on 10 searches per query. So when you give a list of 100 links it will only return 10 of those values (the rest are null). So in a way it can’t, but perhaps it still speeds things up 10x? That is for next time.
Definite Planchet (Who?) for Frankie Muniz playing an aggravating character who everyone tells to shut up a bunch but obviously ultimately lives. Super Product Placement (What?) for a sweet Alienware laptop all up in this piece. A huge Setting as a Character (Where?) for a very very New Orleans film. I think the cursed video game is a MAcGuffin (Why?) for sure. And I love the Worst Twist (How?) whereby the end of the movie is them releasing the killer game despite them breaking the curse. This film is crazy bad looking but hugely entertainingly bad and thus a BMT through and through.
What can we learn about killer video games? Find out in the Quiz. Cheerios,
Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 