Surprised GamerGate hasn’t repurposed the poster to complain that women playing video games and stating Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball ‘N’ Fisting isn’t a paragon of feminism is shackling them, forcing them to hold onto their beloved controller for dear life.
I’m a horror fan, and as a horror fan I recognize that the vast majority of the genre’s movies are terrible. Dull, poorly acted, badly lit, not scary at all, affronts to fashion and common sense – and that’s just the Stephen King adaptations. But I don’t consider this a bug; it’s a feature. See, horror is the genre where being “good” is not the end all and be all, and shitty films can be just as entertaining (if not more so) as good ones. The opposite of terror is laughter, so if a production fails to convince with the former it will inadvertently cause the latter. So with this in mind I’m going to spend some time talking to you about my favorite bad movie for All Hallow’s Eve, a little number called Stay Alive. There are two things you need to know about it right off the boat: it’s about killer video games and it was the last production to film in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina. God hated Stay Alive so fucking much he figured the city had to go. That in itself makes the film something to witness.
Straight from the DVD menu. It’s a testament to me I didn’t eject the disc immediately after seeing it.
Stay Alive comes from this high concept: “what if when you died in a video game you died in real life?”. It’s brilliant in its stupidity and the stupidity only increases when writer-director William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside, some movie where JJ from Criminal Minds has to defend a werewolf in court) has to stretch things out to hit 100 minutes. Loomis Crowley (a name less an homage and more a “fuck you”) is a game tester trying out this new game entitled, creatively enough, Stay Alive. The video game fluent will see the gameplay footage as derivative of Resident Evil, Silent Hill and the like. Anyway, after about 90 seconds of playing the game he’s brutally killed, hanging after being pushed off an indoor balcony. A few hours later it happens to him for real. This would be the weirdest thing in the opening scene had Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia, Rick Rape in Gamer) not barged in on his roommate having sex with his girlfriend while he’s wearing a pig mask. Look, man, it takes a lot to wrap my head around murder by Playstation 2, don’t throw in an unnecessary fetish mask! I spent 25 minutes thinking about that pig mask, which admittedly is time better spent than on the main characters.
There are a lot of mirror gags, I guess because there weren’t enough cliches.
Hutch (Jon Foster, Ben Foster without the charisma) was a childhood friend of Loomis’ and at the funeral he meets a blonde girl (Samaire Armstrong, she was the mother of the kid who shot up the school in Sons of Anarchy) snapping photos with an old timey camera without the implied newsboy cap or “what a scoop!” exclamation following every photo. They get acquainted and have what I believe to be is the first meet-toilet in cinematic history. (She’s over at his place, she goes to the bathroom, Hutch realizes there’s no toilet paper in there and must hand off the paper through the door while she’s on the shitter. It’s a scene you can only get in the unrated director’s cut, which is available anywhere people unload DVDs they no longer want.) Hutch’s shitty friends convince him that he ought to respect Loomis’ death by playing the very game he played before death. These friends include a who’s who of “who?”, like One Tree Hill‘s Sophia Bush as October Bantum, Liam McPoyle as her brother Phineus, Adam Goldberg as the coke snorting boss and noted Obama critic Frankie Muniz as Swink Sylvania. October. Phineus. Swink. What the fuck is with these names? I suppose “memorable” and “horrible” end the same way.
Swink’s avatar is a lot buffer than Frankie Muniz’s Noodle Factory chemical accident body.
One of the reasons I love this movie is that it is rife with video game references and it gets all of them dead wrong. For instance, when we’re introduced to Adam Goldberg, he asks Hutch for advice on Silent Hill 4. It’s been a while, but I don’t remember there being a “hypergun” involved at any point. When the gang boots up Stay Alive, it’s not clear what platform it is. Sometimes they play it on a laptop, other times on a TV screen with controllers, I eventually expected Swink to pull out a Game Boy Advance and manage the same graphics on 2.9 inches of color LCD. The camera shifts from first to third person depending on convenience. The titular game looks outdated even for 2006 and never is it explicated what you have to do in the game or if there’s any purpose beyond wandering around like an idiot in a shitty mansion until a ghost monster, a pale girl most likely, kills you. Frankly, I’m surprised the subject matter isn’t handled worse; for example, the sound effects could come from Space Invaders or Donkey Kong. Cinematic portrayal of video games has come so far.
Shoving a bunch of words in that gerbil’s mouth doesn’t make the movie intellectual or philosophically complex.
People start dying and simply not playing the game anymore isn’t an option. (The game can play itself, which raises the question of why magic cannot accomplish everything.) Here comes the backstory, and it’s as incoherent and baffling as one would expect from Stay Alive. Elizabeth Bathory was driven out of Romania for bathing in the blood of little girls, whereupon she moved to New Orleans, the evil capital of the United States. Then she got older and died, didn’t do much for a couple centuries, and for reasons never explained she compels Angelina Jolie’s brother to create a video game about her all on his lonesome. I know we’re in the age of indie developers, but in 2006 you could not write, code, test, etc. all on your own, especially if you live in a mansion filled to the brim with porcelain dolls and signs of being a serial killer or at least severe Anthony Perkinsism. (Note the character only appears in the unrated director’s cut, so the theatrical version answered the question of “who the hell made the game?” with a raspberry.) Killing people via video game gives Elizabeth Bathory…well, it’s never explained what it does for her. Bring her closer to resurrection? Pay the utility bills on a huge plantation? Who fucking knows? Her master plan shows the same level of care and discipline and thoughtfulness as a villain on Aqua Teen Hunger Force‘s. Don’t worry, though: Stay Alive isn’t about the plot. It’s about the characters, man, and how you want them to die painfully.
Well, he didn’t inherit Jon Voight’s looks either, to be fair…
These characters are memorably obnoxious in a way that almost seems intentional. Phineus, for example, negatively compares beta testing to oral sex, “eating a beav – awesome at first and then goddamn monotonous” and frequently mixes sex and video game terminology, making me question if J.G. Ballard had done a draft on the script. It’s surprising to have someone else be the Matthew Lillard when Frankie Muniz is in the cast, that’s for sure. His sister isn’t any less disgusting, quipping “Everyone who says size doesn’t matter never played a third-person shooter. Can I have a 42-incher. You know I like the big ones”. She means television screens I guess. Unless I’m in Cronenbergville, I don’t want anybody talking about busting a video game’s cherry. I also don’t need useless backstories that are window dressing explorations of one-dimensional characters. Hutch’s burden to overcome is a fear of fire: his dad got fucking wasted on jealousy and burned the house down, killing Hutch’s mother in the process. Samaire Armstrong’s Abigail isn’t a distant friend of Loomis’ roommate’s girlfriend, and all the backstory of hers we never heard isn’t true. She’s actually a homeless drifter who lives in her van! I’d like to see that movie: a pretty blonde busking serial killer. As for Frankie Muniz’s Swink, well, I don’t know where to start. He’s the Shaggy of the group, going on about perceptive reality like an expert when in fact he searches on www.dogpile.com for info on it, and wears a stupid fucking visor that will unite the nation in one thought: take that stupid shit off, you dumb fuck. But at least he can claim responsibility for the sole jump scare that works in Stay Alive.
Another thing that makes it my favorite bad movie comes in the form of Wendell Pierce, Bunk himself. When not in David Simon productions, he pops up in the strangest movies, like Twilight: Dawn Breakin’ 2, Hackers and this. He fulfills the same role in Stay Alive as he does in Hackers, that of the impotent authority figure who never gets ahead of anything. Someone made the decision to involve the local police with all these murders and Bunk could be cut out with no changes to the plot. He is useless, utterly ignorant about video games, shown up by the likes of Frankie Muniz, and there’s no redeeming moment where he busts into the mansion at an opportune time and he doesn’t get a cool death scene. I don’t even think he provides exposition that informs either characters or viewers. His partner, who looks like Tom Sizemore’s stand-in, does receive a grisly murder. After interrogating a Gamestop employee as to what this Stay Alive thing is, he goes back to his car and gets his face exploded in a vise, like in the 30 seconds he played the game. Who knew the human head was 98% blood?
“And I’m sorry I still haven’t finished watching Treme.”
Perhaps Stay Alive‘s narrative blunders would be forgiven if the kills were any good. Unfortunately, the best the film offers is Liam McPoyle being run over by a horse drawn carriage on a road that becomes a video game evil road or otherwise its existence offers evidence that New Orleans needed some flooding to stem the villainy. The kills rely on, well, let’s remember how people on the Internet have argued for months over the “rules” of It Follows and whether the film violated said rules or not. Well, Stay Alive has no rules, and if it did they’d be violated regularly and without apology. By the end of it, Swink is able to use the game to affect reality; for instance, he lays down a crowbar where Hutch is on the stairs of the mansion and suddenly there’s a crowbar. I get that the game already has to affect the physical world because that’s how a video game character can stab Sophia Bush to death with scissors, but at this juncture it becomes downright cartoonish. By the way, I don’t think there’s a way to make a video game character killing someone not look garbage and comical. Maybe we’ll invent a way in the future, but 2006 couldn’t manage it. If Frankie Muniz can create crowbars and unlock doors, why not put in some cheat codes and become God? Gameshark the shit out of the situation, give yourself infinite lives, infinite ammo, capture Mew, all of it. None of this makes any sense anyway, so leaping into abject stupidity wouldn’t hurt.
“You’re sexist, homophobic, disgusting, a drug addict, unfunny…wait, why am I mourning you?”
The film culminates in the surviving cast members – Hutch, Abigail and unfortunately Swink – realizing that they must kill the head vampire to stop the threat, because the game can play itself and obviously shutting off your goddamn Alienware laptop isn’t an option. The corpse of Bathory is on the plantation, behind the cemetery (so many dead slaves…), in a tower. She needs some nails driven through her hands, forehead, heart. This winds up reanimating her, but it’s a good thing Hutch can multitask, overcoming his fear of fire and using his ALIENWARE laptop by ALIENWARE to create a reflection to repel Bathory. (She hates mirrors, for she indulges in what the film calls the worst sin of all, vanity. Apparently the Holomodor isn’t worse.) Am I watching fucking Frankenstein? Why are so many characters’ weaknesses fire? Maybe Hutch is secretly Martian Manhunter and the father burning the house down is just implanted memories.
Adam Goldberg gives the best performance, and that’s never a good sign.
Don’t worry, being burned to death after reanimation via nails can’t stop Bathory and can’t stop this fucking film from including a sequel hook. Although our heroes are safe, the world at large is not, with Stay Alive becoming a demo fixture at Babbage’s. The clerk knew nothing of Stay Alive when the cop asked him, and not too long after he’s stocking a game that’s got a cover story in Game Informer. (Back when games journalism MEANT something, man, and wasn’t hijacked by feminazis and social vengeance blacksmiths or whatever.) Again, before the indie boom, so there must’ve been swaths of dead Sony and Microsoft employees who had to make sure the game met standards. Angelina Jolie’s brother also must’ve spent a lot of money on dev kits to port a lousy Resident Evil ripoff onto multiple platforms. Seeing as how the title seems to be harder than Battletoads, presumably the Blood Queen will be responsible for hundreds if not thousands of death, but precious few of them will be little girls. Sure, some will be guys who pretend they’re little girls online, but that doesn’t really count, does it?
Finally, I love Stay Alive because it’s an utter time capsule, from the huge Steamboy poster in Hutch’s apartment to Swink complaining that he’s going to miss a G4TechTV marathon. The aforementioned Alienware product placement. October and Phineus run/own a coffee shop/Internet cafe. Faded Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers everywhere. Mind you, Stay Alive felt dated when it came out; almost 10 years later it’s to the 00s what Hackers is to the 90s, a hilarious artifact that’s worth seeing with a few friends over some alcoholic beverages. I barely scratched the surface of all the risible nonsense contained within the confines of the film. Early on, Phineus calls Swink’s power glove “gay” and later, after Phin’s been Pierre Curie’d, Swink admits “it is gay”. Remember when calling something gay could function as a character building moment?
Count Gardockula Presents: Stay Alive
Surprised GamerGate hasn’t repurposed the poster to complain that women playing video games and stating Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball ‘N’ Fisting isn’t a paragon of feminism is shackling them, forcing them to hold onto their beloved controller for dear life.
I’m a horror fan, and as a horror fan I recognize that the vast majority of the genre’s movies are terrible. Dull, poorly acted, badly lit, not scary at all, affronts to fashion and common sense – and that’s just the Stephen King adaptations. But I don’t consider this a bug; it’s a feature. See, horror is the genre where being “good” is not the end all and be all, and shitty films can be just as entertaining (if not more so) as good ones. The opposite of terror is laughter, so if a production fails to convince with the former it will inadvertently cause the latter. So with this in mind I’m going to spend some time talking to you about my favorite bad movie for All Hallow’s Eve, a little number called Stay Alive. There are two things you need to know about it right off the boat: it’s about killer video games and it was the last production to film in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina. God hated Stay Alive so fucking much he figured the city had to go. That in itself makes the film something to witness.
Straight from the DVD menu. It’s a testament to me I didn’t eject the disc immediately after seeing it.
Stay Alive comes from this high concept: “what if when you died in a video game you died in real life?”. It’s brilliant in its stupidity and the stupidity only increases when writer-director William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside, some movie where JJ from Criminal Minds has to defend a werewolf in court) has to stretch things out to hit 100 minutes. Loomis Crowley (a name less an homage and more a “fuck you”) is a game tester trying out this new game entitled, creatively enough, Stay Alive. The video game fluent will see the gameplay footage as derivative of Resident Evil, Silent Hill and the like. Anyway, after about 90 seconds of playing the game he’s brutally killed, hanging after being pushed off an indoor balcony. A few hours later it happens to him for real. This would be the weirdest thing in the opening scene had Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia, Rick Rape in Gamer) not barged in on his roommate having sex with his girlfriend while he’s wearing a pig mask. Look, man, it takes a lot to wrap my head around murder by Playstation 2, don’t throw in an unnecessary fetish mask! I spent 25 minutes thinking about that pig mask, which admittedly is time better spent than on the main characters.
There are a lot of mirror gags, I guess because there weren’t enough cliches.
Hutch (Jon Foster, Ben Foster without the charisma) was a childhood friend of Loomis’ and at the funeral he meets a blonde girl (Samaire Armstrong, she was the mother of the kid who shot up the school in Sons of Anarchy) snapping photos with an old timey camera without the implied newsboy cap or “what a scoop!” exclamation following every photo. They get acquainted and have what I believe to be is the first meet-toilet in cinematic history. (She’s over at his place, she goes to the bathroom, Hutch realizes there’s no toilet paper in there and must hand off the paper through the door while she’s on the shitter. It’s a scene you can only get in the unrated director’s cut, which is available anywhere people unload DVDs they no longer want.) Hutch’s shitty friends convince him that he ought to respect Loomis’ death by playing the very game he played before death. These friends include a who’s who of “who?”, like One Tree Hill‘s Sophia Bush as October Bantum, Liam McPoyle as her brother Phineus, Adam Goldberg as the coke snorting boss and noted Obama critic Frankie Muniz as Swink Sylvania. October. Phineus. Swink. What the fuck is with these names? I suppose “memorable” and “horrible” end the same way.
Swink’s avatar is a lot buffer than Frankie Muniz’s Noodle Factory chemical accident body.
One of the reasons I love this movie is that it is rife with video game references and it gets all of them dead wrong. For instance, when we’re introduced to Adam Goldberg, he asks Hutch for advice on Silent Hill 4. It’s been a while, but I don’t remember there being a “hypergun” involved at any point. When the gang boots up Stay Alive, it’s not clear what platform it is. Sometimes they play it on a laptop, other times on a TV screen with controllers, I eventually expected Swink to pull out a Game Boy Advance and manage the same graphics on 2.9 inches of color LCD. The camera shifts from first to third person depending on convenience. The titular game looks outdated even for 2006 and never is it explicated what you have to do in the game or if there’s any purpose beyond wandering around like an idiot in a shitty mansion until a ghost monster, a pale girl most likely, kills you. Frankly, I’m surprised the subject matter isn’t handled worse; for example, the sound effects could come from Space Invaders or Donkey Kong. Cinematic portrayal of video games has come so far.
Shoving a bunch of words in that gerbil’s mouth doesn’t make the movie intellectual or philosophically complex.
People start dying and simply not playing the game anymore isn’t an option. (The game can play itself, which raises the question of why magic cannot accomplish everything.) Here comes the backstory, and it’s as incoherent and baffling as one would expect from Stay Alive. Elizabeth Bathory was driven out of Romania for bathing in the blood of little girls, whereupon she moved to New Orleans, the evil capital of the United States. Then she got older and died, didn’t do much for a couple centuries, and for reasons never explained she compels Angelina Jolie’s brother to create a video game about her all on his lonesome. I know we’re in the age of indie developers, but in 2006 you could not write, code, test, etc. all on your own, especially if you live in a mansion filled to the brim with porcelain dolls and signs of being a serial killer or at least severe Anthony Perkinsism. (Note the character only appears in the unrated director’s cut, so the theatrical version answered the question of “who the hell made the game?” with a raspberry.) Killing people via video game gives Elizabeth Bathory…well, it’s never explained what it does for her. Bring her closer to resurrection? Pay the utility bills on a huge plantation? Who fucking knows? Her master plan shows the same level of care and discipline and thoughtfulness as a villain on Aqua Teen Hunger Force‘s. Don’t worry, though: Stay Alive isn’t about the plot. It’s about the characters, man, and how you want them to die painfully.
Well, he didn’t inherit Jon Voight’s looks either, to be fair…
These characters are memorably obnoxious in a way that almost seems intentional. Phineus, for example, negatively compares beta testing to oral sex, “eating a beav – awesome at first and then goddamn monotonous” and frequently mixes sex and video game terminology, making me question if J.G. Ballard had done a draft on the script. It’s surprising to have someone else be the Matthew Lillard when Frankie Muniz is in the cast, that’s for sure. His sister isn’t any less disgusting, quipping “Everyone who says size doesn’t matter never played a third-person shooter. Can I have a 42-incher. You know I like the big ones”. She means television screens I guess. Unless I’m in Cronenbergville, I don’t want anybody talking about busting a video game’s cherry. I also don’t need useless backstories that are window dressing explorations of one-dimensional characters. Hutch’s burden to overcome is a fear of fire: his dad got fucking wasted on jealousy and burned the house down, killing Hutch’s mother in the process. Samaire Armstrong’s Abigail isn’t a distant friend of Loomis’ roommate’s girlfriend, and all the backstory of hers we never heard isn’t true. She’s actually a homeless drifter who lives in her van! I’d like to see that movie: a pretty blonde busking serial killer. As for Frankie Muniz’s Swink, well, I don’t know where to start. He’s the Shaggy of the group, going on about perceptive reality like an expert when in fact he searches on www.dogpile.com for info on it, and wears a stupid fucking visor that will unite the nation in one thought: take that stupid shit off, you dumb fuck. But at least he can claim responsibility for the sole jump scare that works in Stay Alive.
Another thing that makes it my favorite bad movie comes in the form of Wendell Pierce, Bunk himself. When not in David Simon productions, he pops up in the strangest movies, like Twilight: Dawn Breakin’ 2, Hackers and this. He fulfills the same role in Stay Alive as he does in Hackers, that of the impotent authority figure who never gets ahead of anything. Someone made the decision to involve the local police with all these murders and Bunk could be cut out with no changes to the plot. He is useless, utterly ignorant about video games, shown up by the likes of Frankie Muniz, and there’s no redeeming moment where he busts into the mansion at an opportune time and he doesn’t get a cool death scene. I don’t even think he provides exposition that informs either characters or viewers. His partner, who looks like Tom Sizemore’s stand-in, does receive a grisly murder. After interrogating a Gamestop employee as to what this Stay Alive thing is, he goes back to his car and gets his face exploded in a vise, like in the 30 seconds he played the game. Who knew the human head was 98% blood?
“And I’m sorry I still haven’t finished watching Treme.”
Perhaps Stay Alive‘s narrative blunders would be forgiven if the kills were any good. Unfortunately, the best the film offers is Liam McPoyle being run over by a horse drawn carriage on a road that becomes a video game evil road or otherwise its existence offers evidence that New Orleans needed some flooding to stem the villainy. The kills rely on, well, let’s remember how people on the Internet have argued for months over the “rules” of It Follows and whether the film violated said rules or not. Well, Stay Alive has no rules, and if it did they’d be violated regularly and without apology. By the end of it, Swink is able to use the game to affect reality; for instance, he lays down a crowbar where Hutch is on the stairs of the mansion and suddenly there’s a crowbar. I get that the game already has to affect the physical world because that’s how a video game character can stab Sophia Bush to death with scissors, but at this juncture it becomes downright cartoonish. By the way, I don’t think there’s a way to make a video game character killing someone not look garbage and comical. Maybe we’ll invent a way in the future, but 2006 couldn’t manage it. If Frankie Muniz can create crowbars and unlock doors, why not put in some cheat codes and become God? Gameshark the shit out of the situation, give yourself infinite lives, infinite ammo, capture Mew, all of it. None of this makes any sense anyway, so leaping into abject stupidity wouldn’t hurt.
“You’re sexist, homophobic, disgusting, a drug addict, unfunny…wait, why am I mourning you?”
The film culminates in the surviving cast members – Hutch, Abigail and unfortunately Swink – realizing that they must kill the head vampire to stop the threat, because the game can play itself and obviously shutting off your goddamn Alienware laptop isn’t an option. The corpse of Bathory is on the plantation, behind the cemetery (so many dead slaves…), in a tower. She needs some nails driven through her hands, forehead, heart. This winds up reanimating her, but it’s a good thing Hutch can multitask, overcoming his fear of fire and using his ALIENWARE laptop by ALIENWARE to create a reflection to repel Bathory. (She hates mirrors, for she indulges in what the film calls the worst sin of all, vanity. Apparently the Holomodor isn’t worse.) Am I watching fucking Frankenstein? Why are so many characters’ weaknesses fire? Maybe Hutch is secretly Martian Manhunter and the father burning the house down is just implanted memories.
Adam Goldberg gives the best performance, and that’s never a good sign.
Don’t worry, being burned to death after reanimation via nails can’t stop Bathory and can’t stop this fucking film from including a sequel hook. Although our heroes are safe, the world at large is not, with Stay Alive becoming a demo fixture at Babbage’s. The clerk knew nothing of Stay Alive when the cop asked him, and not too long after he’s stocking a game that’s got a cover story in Game Informer. (Back when games journalism MEANT something, man, and wasn’t hijacked by feminazis and social vengeance blacksmiths or whatever.) Again, before the indie boom, so there must’ve been swaths of dead Sony and Microsoft employees who had to make sure the game met standards. Angelina Jolie’s brother also must’ve spent a lot of money on dev kits to port a lousy Resident Evil ripoff onto multiple platforms. Seeing as how the title seems to be harder than Battletoads, presumably the Blood Queen will be responsible for hundreds if not thousands of death, but precious few of them will be little girls. Sure, some will be guys who pretend they’re little girls online, but that doesn’t really count, does it?
Finally, I love Stay Alive because it’s an utter time capsule, from the huge Steamboy poster in Hutch’s apartment to Swink complaining that he’s going to miss a G4TechTV marathon. The aforementioned Alienware product placement. October and Phineus run/own a coffee shop/Internet cafe. Faded Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers everywhere. Mind you, Stay Alive felt dated when it came out; almost 10 years later it’s to the 00s what Hackers is to the 90s, a hilarious artifact that’s worth seeing with a few friends over some alcoholic beverages. I barely scratched the surface of all the risible nonsense contained within the confines of the film. Early on, Phineus calls Swink’s power glove “gay” and later, after Phin’s been Pierre Curie’d, Swink admits “it is gay”. Remember when calling something gay could function as a character building moment?
Ronnie Gardocki
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