While we get some insight into the creation of the video game and where it was made, there’s not a lot of time spent explaining who actually made the game, which is probably to the film’s benefit. It means we never have to wait too long between the scares but we still get to explore the lore behind Stay Alive’s creation without any padding. Instead, October shouts facts about Elizabeth Bathory down the phone to Hutch as he drives from one location to the next, Abigail and Hutch split up when they reach the Gerouge Plantation and each makes separate, significant discoveries, and Hutch finds the clue he needs the first time when he goes to explore Loomis’ house. Rather than fall into the research hole that a lot of horror movies do, Stay Alive keeps things moving, treating us to frequent deaths, and regular creepy video game sequences.
This means that Hutch and his friends manage to figure out what is going on pretty quickly. With a runtime of 86 minutes, Stay Alive doesn’t waste a lot of time getting into things. If Stay Alive had been released as a spin-off game, I could see it being a great way to spend an evening with your friends, as long as you could avoid dying. There are in-depth levels of character customisation, creepy villains, a clear objective for the players, and pretty gnarly death scenes. One thing that works particularly well about Stay Alive is that the clips we get to see of the video game itself make it look like something you would want to play.
The opening of Stay Alive could be something straight out of Silent Hill (1999) or Resident Evil (1996), ensuring that fans of both scary movies and horror video games feel right at home as soon as the film starts. And while they make the pretty obvious choice to stop playing the game from then on, it turns out Elizabeth Bathory (Maria Kalinina) isn’t above a little cheating, forcing the game to continue even when the characters don’t want to participate. The group quickly work out that if you die in the game, then you die for real, and you only have one life to work with. While Swink believes voice activation is the sign of next-level technology, it turns out there could be something far more sinister at work.Īfter Miller is killed in his office, Hutch realises that there may be a connection between the in-game deaths and the murders in real life. In order to start playing the game, the group must recite an incantation. Because Hutch and his friends have never heard of this new horror game and are keen to have a gaming session to remember Loomis, Hutch invites Swink (Frankie Muniz), siblings October (Sophia Bush) and Phin (Jimmi Simpson), his boss Miller (Adam Goldberg), and Abigail (Samaire Armstrong), who he met at Loomis’ funeral, over to his apartment so they can experience Dead Alive. Loomis is a lifelong friend of Hutch (Jon Foster), and at Loomis’ funeral, he is gifted a bag of video games, including the beta version of Stay Alive. Later that night, Loomis has a creepy encounter in the kitchen with a shadowy figure, finds his roommates brutally murdered, and stumbles off the staircase in the kerfuffle, ending up dead in an eerily similar way to his game character. After a run-in with a lot of creepy characters, Loomis’ character is pushed off a staircase and hung. The film opens with a video game sequence showing Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia) playing a game he’s beta testing called Stay Alive. While the story of Stay Alive is fictional, the villain is based on the legend of Elizabeth Bathory and her love of bathing in the blood of virgins in order to keep herself young. 2003 gave us the Tooth Fairy fable Darkness Falls, 2007 saw James Wan dive into the world of ventriloquist dummies with Dead Silence, and in between both these movies we got Stay Alive (2006).
The 2000s were a special time if you liked movies about dead, older women using inventive ways to return from the dead and kill people.
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