Stay
Alive is the perfect movie for a midnight screening, because the only way it can
be fully enjoyed is if you're free to openly make fun of it, and you have an appreciative
audience for your verbal pot-shots. Adam and I took it in with about a dozen kids
and I must say, even though I’m supposed to be the funny one, when it comes
to making hilarious wisecracks during a silly horror flick, Adam Mast takes a
back seat to no one. With his arsenal of movie quotes and a gunslingers instinct
for timing, I’m no match for the Mast-er.
First
of all I’m the worst possible audience for a film based on a video game.
When I was starting High School, Pong started popping up in our hang-outs and
was universally derided by a generation who’d grown up with skills honed
by pinball and fooseball. That was where a real man slipped his quarters - Pong
was regarded as a boring little fad. This is where I admit that we all very shortsighted
and stupid. By the time Pac-man came along I was too old to catch the fever, I
was much more focused on college girls (a diversion that will most likely never
lose it’s popularity) but some of these video games are giving indiscriminate
sex a run for it’s money.
When
I tell people that I’ve never spent more than a total of about a half hour
of my life playing any kind of video game, they shake their heads as though it’s
something I should be pitied for, like I’m mildly retarded or was born partially
deaf. I’ve watched other people play a few of these games and am duly impressed
by their skills as well as the amazing technology that they display. Let’s
just say Pong never gave me nightmares, and so a film like Stay Alive is as alien
to me as Fellini to a toddler.
Not
that I didn’t find Stay Alive oddly entertaining (Adam joked both that they
should have called it “Stay Awake,” and summed up his many remarks by
announcing the film to be gayer than Brokeback Mountain.) Still when the time
came when I needed to run to the restroom, I hurried back and even got a little
freaked out when the toilet flushed itself. I was surprised to see a few recognizable
stars in the film, both Adam Goldberg and Frankie Muniz were on board for this
cgi haunt and one of them even lives to tell the tale. Adam kept us up on where
the film was borrowing from - but I wasn’t bothered by it’s derivative
plot structure, because I hadn’t seen any of the films he called off. I will
say that most of the creepy phantasms were variations on a theme from The Ring
and The Grudge (pallid corpse-like creepy-walking girls) who were only scary when
the film thrust them at you unexpectedly along with the expected musical crescendo.
The
films many characters were offed in grisly fashion but it’s makers shied
away from any gory money shots, only doling out a few of the less messy after
effects. This and the lack of gratuitous nudity were ultimately disappointing
for a movie of this ilk. (PG-13) what a buzzkill! The story revolves around a
video game that sucks you in as a character in it’s macabre paradigm and
if you are offed in the game, you would suffer the same nasty demise in real life.
But the easy solution of simply not playing the game anymore proved fruitless
as the game would play itself sans gamers and there seems to be no escape - ala
Final Destination. As we come to find out the game is based on actual events surrounding
a mad southern plantation Baroness with a penchant for capturing hapless victims
(mostly young girls whom she despised due to their youth) and chaining them up
in a gothic torture chamber and letting a nasty pair of sewing sheers and gravity
take care of the blood-letting.
Evidently
these events took place before the American judicial system - as we know it -
had really gelled, because when they caught the woman and judged her guilty of
her many gruesome deeds, instead of bringing her to trial they simply locked her
away in a tower on her plantation to die of deprivation. Oh but as they chained
the tower up she vowed to return one day and so on and so forth. Once their friends
start dropping like flies, leads Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong and Muniz discover
the location of the titular game’s developers and darned if when they arrived
at the address, it wasn’t the self same plantation fabled in story and song.
The film offers some fun characters who spout laughable dialogue “Whoa she’s
got serious body karate,” states Phin (Jimmi Simpson) a sort of new age James
Spader. But it’s the kind of bad that has camp value and makes you roll your
eyes not in total dismay but in a sort of bemused enjoyment.
Stay
Alive is chuck full of corny stuff, but it has more of a popcorny feel that more
or less gives an audience it’s money’s worth. The younger members of
the crowd were quite into it - gamers themselves, no doubt. It all comes to a
fairly predictable climax in the tower of doom - where the witch reincarnate could
only be summarily dispatched according to the rules of witchcraft - a nail here
a nail there and then she must be sparked up. As the living members of the cast
retreat from their grisly chore, they show the smoke coming from the tower in
the background which had to have been someone’s idea of an allusion to 911
- though the idea of a parallel (cyber-phantasmic terrorists) is more than a reach.
The
film will not be judged Fresh in the great tomatometer of the nation’s critics,
but to be fair I half-way enjoyed myself - mainly because this is the type of
film I invariably skip and thus it had a certain novel charm for this reporter.
