Friday, March 24, 2006

Stay Alive (*1/2)


An unscary horror film with poorly filmed death scenes, weak characters, and the promising but badly executed premise of a video game becoming reality.

Here’s a lifeless horror film about a video game coming to life, just like in the awful Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. The idea has potential, and if you want to see that potential realized, go rent eXistenZ, the badly titled but effective David Cronenberg film from 1999. Few scenes here are even scary. As for the characters, at best, you won’t care about them. At worst, they’re annoying, especially the one played by the only semi-big name in the cast, Frankie Muniz of Malcolm in the Middle. He’s kind of like Malcolm with a lobotomy, mumbling silly theories about why dying in the game might be leading them to die in real life. But even someone with temporal lobes intact would have trouble making sense of this. Ideally, the video game would have clear rules that the players could follow to avoid dying. Ideally, the movie would try to explain why/how some long-dead/foreign crazy woman would be making a comeback in New Orleans/via a video game. Ideally, no one else will mistakenly see this.


posted 9/5/13

No comments:

Post a Comment