Stay Alive – Unrated Director’s Cut
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: D Film: D
Hollywood
wonders why it is having box office troubles.
The number one rule of any business, unless you are into war
profiteering, genocide or are so arrogant about your profits that you do not
care to see who suffers, is never treat your core customers badly. Since the 1980s, Hollywood decided to only
focus on dumb releases for a young quick-profit crowd. Part of this has had to do with perpetuating
a bizarre sense of self-hating against those as if they would tolerate the bad
treatment and come back. The
slice-and-dice slasher films had some of that going for it, but long after the
collapse of such fare, William Brent Bell’s Stay Alive (2006) joins the third Final Destination installment as this year’s most prominent “happy
snuff” film.
This
time, instead of being caught in photos or being stuck in a curse from a
previous film (in part, by being in its sequel), it is the dreaded “hip
videogame movie” that no one thinks is worth anything. In it, the cast of mostly unknown actors
(does Frankie Muniz really deserve this?) are once again set up to get killed
just for playing a supposedly haunted videogame. At first, they are not aware of this, then
the “horror” begins to unfold. Instead
of alerting the videogame company, the police, a lawyer, The FBI, the media or
Homeland Security, they decide to play it and each get killed.
Even when
it seems at first someone did not, it turns out they did as in the scene where
the guy who swears off even playing has secretly played. How do we know he is the big sneak? Well, he drives and Pontiac Fiero and sings
old tired hits by Air Supply circa 1982, so therefore he must die!
So should
this box office bomb. With a bad “low voice”
that sounds like an extra royalty check for the Jigsaw character in the lame Saw franchise, the cast of idiots are
threatened and they start getting killed off gruesomely one by one. 20 minutes in and the dialogue and their lack
of common sense telegraphs to us that they not only are going to meet a
terrible fate, but that they somehow deserve it for being some insidious form
of “stupid” the film (and snuff cycle) defines and should be mutilated in the
worst, most sadistic, painful possible way.
This is
not a film about Horror, the Supernatural or Videogames, but a snuff film not
so cleverly disguised as any of the above.
If you do not know what a snuff film is, it is about seeing actual
footage of an actual murder taking place on film and watching the people
die. Are we supposed to enjoy that? Bell and his cohorts think so and though no
one is killed, this is so graphic, that only those who enjoy Taliban/Al Qaeda
beheadings should look into it and the connection of this cycle to terrorism is
not as remote as it may seem.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image was shot in Super 35mm film and
digitized to death to be a videogame film to the point of being a joke. Oh, humor!
The Dolby Digital has 5.1 tracks and is clueless in what to do with them. At least the Freddie and Jason films had some
sense of humor, but this does not and the flat mix further emphasized the
intended grimness of this mess. Extras
include an audio commentary by Bell (oh, the wisdom, or is that wis-dumb), a
dumb building the character piece in the menu and digital visual effects
featurette that reveals further how cheap and pathetic this all is.
- Nicholas Sheffo
