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List Price: $14.99 | | Label: Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Hollywood
Salesrank: 14693
Released: September 19, 2006 |
| Our Price: $3.25 |
| Used Price: $1.65 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
IN THEATERS MARCH 24 2006 This pop culture-laden fright-fest takes the legend of Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary and relocates it in the inherently creepy locale of New Orleans. The usual cast of motley and none-too-bright teenagers is assembled and attached to quirky names--smartass Phineas (Jimmi Simpson) and his Goth-girl sister October (Sophia Bush) hunky protagonist Hutch (Jon Foster) and tech-head Swink (Frankie Muniz) to name a few--and they all have one thing in common: the love of gaming. When Hutch s best friend Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia) is a victim in a violent massacre Hutch ends up with the game he was playing just before he died. Called "Stay Alive" the game is technically illegal and Hutch and his friends can t resist booting it up. The game resurrects the Countess who centuries ago was walled up in her tower when her crimes were discovered (she is said to have brutally murdered 650 servant girls and bathed in their blood). Now she is fulfilling her vow to return to reassume her reign of terror. This time however her victims are gamers who will die in the same way in life as they do in the game. The video game itself becomes a character in the film showing off excellent 3-D cinematic effects and creating an effectively spooky atmosphere with a memorable if derivative aesthetic. The gore never escalates past PG-13 levels but the scare tactics are adept while the Countess herself with pasty skin and high-necked red dress is a movie monster worthy of canonization.System Requirements:Runtime: 85 minutes Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: PG-13 UPC: 786936709384 Manufacturer No: 05102600
Description of Stay Alive - The Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition):
Straight from the set-'em-up and knock-'em-down school of teen-horror filmmaking, Stay Alive gives literal meaning to the parental lament, "Those games will kill you someday." Not that you'll find any parents in this gimmicky thriller set in New Orleans; they're conspicuously absent when Hutch (Jon Foster) and his hardcore gamer pals discover "Stay Alive," a mysterious next-generation computer game that has a nasty way of precipitating mayhem, horror, and death. If your character dies in the game, you're doomed to die in identically grisly fashion in real life. So, just don't play the game, right? WRONG. This being a teen horror flick with a screenplay that makes no sense whatsoever, the gamer pals (including victim #2, Hutch's boss, played with game-addicted fervor by Adam Goldberg) obsessively investigate the game and its creepy Ring-like origins in the 17th century murder spree of a woman known as "The Blood Countess." Because movies like this are best viewed on a steady diet of Pop Tarts and Ritalin, Jimmi Simpson earns top honors as the gamer pal with the creepiest behavior, and Malcolm in the Middle fans will enjoy the presence of Frankie Muniz as a gamer geek whose primary fashion statement consists of grimy T-shirts and green plastic poker-visors. While not nearly as fun or clever as the Final Destination movies, Stay Alive delivers a few good deaths while blatantly stealing most of its horror highlights from Ju-On and other Japanese horror hits. It's junk from start to finish, but its target audience of mallrats and gamers (especially those with attention deficit disorder, which helps to ignore the plot holes) won't mind a bit.--Jeff Shannon
Stay Alive - The Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition) Reviews:
really terrible for a variety of reasons 
2009-11-26 - I love slasher films. I love video games. I hated Stay Alive with a passion.
So the question is- can YOU stay alive while watching this terrible movie?
The deaths were really exceptionally unbearably awful. A guy walks down the hallway, you hear a loud noise, and suddenly he's hanging from the ceiling, dead. That's how he died. No dramatic or interesting build-up even leading to it- he just dies.
All the deaths in the movie are pretty much the same inexcusable way. Just bland, just terrible.
Of course, whenever you watch a horror movie where the storyline focuses on a video game, the video game itself is almost always VERY different from the kind of violent video games we play in real life, and this movie is no exception.
At the very least, the concept of "staying alive" should have been better utilized in this fictional video game. It wasn't. People would die in the video game, and then moments later they'd die in reality. Executed extremely poorly.
Come on, a guy leaves his car, and suddenly a magical horse and buggy appears and runs him over? Bad writing.
When will movie writers stop making films such as this one? People don't need to see another poor and uninteresting attempt at scaring them, only to end up very disappointed when the film is finally over and the people never got what the movie promised- scary slasher scenes, violence, and blood and guts.
Don't even think about buying this film in DVD. The quality is so low budget that it's completely worthless.
thoughts. 
2009-05-22 - The main thing i liked about this movie was how they tied the history of Elizabeth Bathory(one of my ancsters) into the plot line.
However, Eliazbeth WAS NOT AMERICAN!
so why was the setting of the film in america!? Lol. She was romanian, and I'm pretty sure she was hungarian as well.
The actors were alright, but, why frankie muinz? oh god. Lol!
over all, my dvd arrived a few days after ordering it, brand new.
AND IT WAS NOT BOOTLEGGED.
Affirrmative Action 
2009-03-23 - Astoundingly bad horror film with a good title, and a complete waste of time, Stay Alive is to be applauded for giving dozens of Louisianans their first real film work after Hurricane Katrina came in and tore up the delta. When Milo stumbles on a video game called Stay Alive, he is driven to hang himself just as his character in the game, and his housemates are found savagely hacked to death. Jon Foster, his best friend, wonders what could have made Mile commit suicide, for he was always a cheerful boy without a care in the world. At the funeral he meets the bizarre and annoying Samaire Armstrong, who is photographing all the mourners with an old fashioned camera I thought was going to eventually prove she was evil, or came from another dimension, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong and I don't mind admitting it. What was the reason for her being a photographer, I wonder. Some reviewers have said that her camera is a clever visual reference to a previous video game or horror movie in which the heroine sports a similar outmoded box camera. Wouldn't you think that her camera would wind up solving the mystery? No, that was not in the version of Screenwriting 101 that these bozos took, or perhaps they only went to the class in which they were told, hire the very worst actors available to you at all times.
In fact I used to like Jon Foster, especially in that movie where he was hired by Jeff Bridges essentially to babysit his mentally troubled wife Kim Basinger. Sexy! And indeed I used to like Samaire Armstrong on The O.C. The other actors, Sophia Bush as a goth babe called Öctober, the Malcolm in the Middle kid, now grown up and uglier than a crawfish, and whoever the brother was of October who gets run down by a stagecoach, they should all resign from acting. Adam Goldberg has a bit part in this--just asking for death. And how did they manage to rig up the plot so there are absolutely no black people in Louisiana I wonder, beyond Bunk from The Wire, who is probably wishing that Paul Chan's avant-garde production of Waiting for Godot on the banks of the broken levee paid a little bit more. The evil blood countess Elizabeth Bathory is the villain here, the mistress of a pre Civil war plantation at which, looks like, only white girls worked. What? White slavery in the old South? Weren't black people good enough even to be slaves?
Stay Alive 
2009-03-14 - After the death of a friend, five twenty-somethings plug in to the cursed video game that killed him.
Okay, so that sounds like a stupid premise. And yes, there are times the writing lives down to the genre's expectations. Yet, there's still something intriguing about the story, the mythology used to build it, and the ways in which the old school (ancient curse) and new school (video games) meet head on.
Not Oscar-worthy, but not a bad waste of a few hours, either.
Entertaining 
2008-11-15 - This is not a movie that will ever win any great awards, but I like it. It's very entertaining, and it has some amusing characters. I think that with a bigger budget and a little more plot, they could have really made this a pretty good movie.
