Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)First of all, I didn't have too high of hopes for STAY ALIVE going in. I had heard numerous negative reviews and I can't stand the ARROGANT and works more than he deserves to FRANKIE MUNIZ. By the way, Frankie must have the greatest agent of all time. Not only does he keep working, but he manages to get a pivotal part in this movie when he should have been one of the death scenes.
STAY ALIVE actually has a pretty fun premise. Ridiculous. Yes. A ripoff of THE RING. A little bit. Yet, if you can manage to remember that your watching a movie and can forget reality for a couple of hours, STAY ALIVE actually is pretty fun and actually has a really effective and scary edge to it. In fact, the whole story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Maria Kalinina) is very intriguing, disturbing and a tremendous idea to build a scary movie around. The moments when she appears, or just stands in a corner in her bright red victorian dress are frightening.
The movie centers around an underground video game that seems to reach beyond the PS2 console and effect real life. A ghost story bottled into a video game disc.
So, where does STAY ALIVE go wrong? Many places... and that's the problem. They took this incredible premise of a women who thinks the blood of young girls can keep her young, and wasted it. That to me is the biggest problem. They wasted a FANTASTIC chance to do something cool and unique, and instead did what all scary movies do... wasted time explaining and showing the unknowing characters trying to get each other to believing each other and much worse, getting the authorities to believe them.
Instead, they should have spent more time INSIDE THE GAME!! They should have abandoned the real life encounters and delved into a COOL WORLDish situation. They should have teamed up with the animators of the FINAL FANTASY MOVIES and did something cool, and more importantly, something unforgettable.
The story behind the game was enough to suffice. It was the coolest part of the movie, but 30 minutes in, the characters strapped into their headsets, grabbed their controllers, played for 3 minutes and quit.
This is where the movie, to me, didn't stay alive. It died. It lost its edge and got boring. Up to the point when they got into the game, I was glued. I liked it, despite goofball Frankie Muniz sitting there with his viser on sideways and talking. The moment the movie quit relying on the game to tell the story, the movie died.
Finally, sure, I didn't like that Frankie Muniz was in the movie, but the fact that he or his agent managed to talk the directors or writers into giving him this pivotal part at the end of the film and made him seem like the hero of the film seemed like just that... like an agent or himself had used their pull to weasel him into that final scene. Ridiculous and unnecessary. It was enough for me to hate the movie, just the fact that he didn't buy it.
This could have been a really good film, but the creators made a lot of ill choices and it should have been better. I took 2 stars away for the lack of video game realiance, and another for Frankie Muniz not dieing.
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STAY ALIVE - DVD Movie
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