Richard's Online Journal
[01/04/07] Stay Alive
Actual pre-rendered game footage! Like Killzone!
After watching Stay Alive, a straight-to-the-toilet movie from 2006, I believe I have finally seen every movie made about videogaming. The Wizard? Check. Super Mario Brothers? Check. Erotic Raider? Check, although it was for work purposes, and I don’t believe I can damn it any higher than by saying I fast-forwarded the sex parts to get to the dialogue. I’ve even seen all of Uwe Boll’s masterpieces. But Stay Alive, I never got around to enduring.
Seeing. I mean seeing.
The basic plotline goes something like this: there’s a haunted survival horror game containing the spirit of the Blood Countess, one Elizabeth Bathory - merely the first of many bottoms waved at gamers, if you know that Bathory’s victims were virgins. (Or maybe not. It’s been also suggested that her habit of bathing in blood was dreamed up by local law enforcement to get at her, not that it really matters). Movie Death Rule: If you die in the game, you die for real.
We open on The House of the Dead, and a guy who looks a bit like Johnny Depp, dressed as Adam from Realms of the Haunting. Into the house he goes, and promptly proves to be the wussiest gamer in the entire universe by doing nothing but running away from a monster, up some stairs past a Scary Little Girl (they’re so common these days - FEAR, Fahrenheit, Dreamfall - that no gamer would get into a tizzy when one shows up) and finally falling backwards over a staircase that leaves him hanging from the ceiling for no apparent reason.
Great. Stay Alive has Sierra Sudden Death Syndrome.
“Sickest shit since Fatal Frame,” Pseudo-Depp announces, marking the first of many references to games that the makers of this movie have totally played. A noise from upstairs distracts him, and he wanders upstairs to a bedroom. Inside, a guy wearing a pig mask is having sex, and the girl shouts out “Shut the door, you perv.” Ah, young love. I’m sure they will both live long, rich, fulfilling lives.
Pseudo-Depp ambles around some more, holding a lighter that emits absolutely no light whatsoever; perhaps the only gaming thing the film-makers get correct. A few scary flashes of generic horror later, he hears a scream, hurls his glass of milk - yeah, he’s a cool guy - down to the ground like he’s at a Greek wedding - and dashes back up to the bedroom, pretending to be scared, but most likely just hoping to see a nipple this time. Unfortunately, this movie was PG-13 rated, so there’s just the family friendly sight of hard to see corpses awaiting him. He screams, a chain wraps around his neck from nowhere, and he hangs from the ceiling, just like he did in the game.
The title appears. STAY ALIVE. What is it with filmmakers and their terrible game names? Remember the Sandra Bullock snorer ‘The Net’? Wasn’t her game called RUN LIKE HELL? Good job nobody would release something with a silly name like that in the real world. Not to mention that this title offers up one fairly obvious oddity. Since as the movie goes on to show, Bathory made this game herself, you’d think she’d give it a more appropriate title. SAFE PUZZLE ADVENTURE perhaps, or WHY NOT VISIT THE BASEMENT?
Evil. It never sleeps. It does however let you pause.
Anyhow, none of this matters as we move into the Victim Roster part of our lame horror movie. Our hero, Hutch - yes, really - is busy working for The Man, who is quickly revealed to have hired him because of his epic knowledge of computer games. He promptly namedrops the second game that the filmmakers haven’t played, Silent Hill 4, pleading with Hutch to help him deal with a boss and a weapon called a hyper blaster. Cue the first of many, many face-plants. If you’re going to start dropping stuff like this to prove you know your stuff, it’s usually wise to make sure you don’t completely arse it up. Hutch confidently serves up a tip for a totally different game, and not only that, a tip that’s entirely useless unless you’ve already completed said game.
Brilliant. Totally worth skipping the five seconds it would have taken to swipe an actual solution off GameFAQs. They couldn’t have ballsed this one up more if they’d tried.
Sadly, life can’t all be fun and pretending to know anything about games. Hutch’s helpline goes on hold as he receives a phonecall telling him about Pseudo-Depp’s tragic end, and we move to the funeral. Here, an irritatingly perky blonde girl is wandering around taking photos on the world’s oldest camera, establishing herself as both Quirky Girl, and ultimately the Designated Female Survivor. Hutch, having demonstrated his Sensitive Side, will of course be the Designated Male Survivor, and the two of them will find a whole level of spiritual love in the course of almost being slaughtered by a vampiric wraith.
Sounds silly, yes, but still a better success rate than speed dating.
Pseudo-Depp’s sister promptly hands over her brother’s games collection while Designated Female Survivor acts all quirky. Soon enough though, it’s onto the Victim Roster part of the movie. For this movie, we’ve got Goth Chick, Really Annoying Brother, and Irritating Brat, played by Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle. Pseudo-Depp’s name is also revealed as Loomis Crowley. A pause to giggle.
Guest Starring Steamboy as The Product! Placement!
It turns out that Crowley was beta testing a game called Stay Alive, putting the evil Countess Bathory a few steps ahead of Ubisoft in the QA department. Really Annoying Brother decides that everyone should get together for a LAN party in honour of their fallen comrade. Well, whatever. This takes place in Hutch’s apartment, featuring a whole wall devoted to an advert - sorry, a poster, for Katushiro Otomo’s Steamboy. Product! Placement! This element only gets more intrusive over the rest of the movie.
The gang shows up, monitors and PCs in tow. Really Annoying Brother makes an incomprehensible reference to Quirky Girl having ‘body karate’, to which Goth Chick announces “Anyone who says size doesn’t matter never played a third person shooter.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Sure, yeah, it’s a penis reference, but if we’re going to do game gags about sexual characteristics, shouldn’t it be something like ‘wrapped round a hot rocket launcher’ or ‘had to wear a bra built to transport baby elephants’. Third person shooter? That’s nonsense, movie!
Anyway, it’s time for the epic that is Stay Alive to fire up. Most of the Victim Roster is sitting around in Hutch’s walk-in advert for Steamboy, while his boss is playing from a work PC. He will of course be the first to die, because he is The Man. Everyone has a computer, even though we later find out that this is a console game, their own monitor, and a big joypad. In the single, solitary instance of the movie getting it right, the first thing that happens is everyone wanting to skip the opening cut-scene.
Enjoy this accuracy while it lasts.
A bloodsoaked, Bible style book floats onto the screen, and opens up to reveal the ‘Prayer of Elizabeth’ - a bit of generic Goth prose that doesn’t respond to any controls. Yes, the movie has crashed. Oh, wait. Sorry. Quirky Girl suggests that they might have to read it out loud, like the half-hour opening crawl from the Alone in the Dark movie. “No way,” Irritating Brat tells her. “That’s next generation technology!” I wonder who’s going to tell Konami, which released Lifeline three years earlier.
In any case, Hutch begins reading out the Prayer, and the letters start fading away. Everyone joins in with the Reading Is Fun subgame, which goes (best as I can tell, anyway...) like this:
Come to me Clouds
May you rise as an evil storm
Born to rip them open
Let the cover of night bear witness
who resist so they will harm me not
Let the blood of many cleanse me,
preserving beauty eternal
I pray you
Prayer over, they stare dumbly at the screen as the full-force of that complete and total gibberish washes over them. Luckily, before anyone has time to start giggling, a Spooky Voice cuts in with “Welcome. If you are listening to this, you have made a grave mistake.” And every single gamer does the exact same Daikatana joke.
Spooky Voice continues as the gang runs through the character creation system, in which none of the guys choose to represent themselves as a lithe redhead with planet sized boobs, and only one of the girls ends up looking like an 80s rocker. Gamer culture? Pah! Everyone promptly creates a nigh-perfect - albeit Poser style - recreation of themselves, and the game is finally - finally - afoot.
Our heroes assemble. Virtually.
Spooky Voice continues. “Two hundred years ago, Countess Elizabeth Bathory opened Gerouge (Plantation) as a finishing school for young-”
Wait. Stop right there, movie. Bathory lived in the 17th century, in Cachtice Castle, Slovakia. Not a plantation in Louisiana with the single cheapest CG tower I have ever seen sticking out of its arse. She may as well be a space vampire from the Moon. A werewolf emissary from the Mole People. A shameless rip-off of Sadoko from Ring.
Oh.
“The evil of Gerouge… has been reborn,” it continues, zooming back in on Curien’s mansion, now with our Poser style heroes’ avatars standing on the path. Immediately, they’re attacked by a generic Scary Little Girl, and the roomful of seasoned, gung-ho gamers stand around like lemons debating what to do about it, until Hutch proves his manliness and leadership abilities by… well, shooting her with his gun until she dies. Inspired.
(Again, I query this game setting. The team is armed with just about everything from quarterstaves to multi-chambered crossbows. If I ever come back as a vengeful wraith, using computer games as the instrument of my will, my victims will get rubber chickens and maybe a staple gun if I’m feeling really generous...)
Scary Little Girl vanishes, leaving behind a rose. “Yeah, the undead can’t cross the twig of a wild rose,” comments Goth Chick, nodding as if to say “Duh...”
“This game’s fun, but it kinda moves at a slow pace,” replies Really Annoying Brother, as we cut to an FPS sequence in a graveyard. Survival horror to full on Painkiller style zombie-killing in two seconds. Yeah. Nothing weird about that at all. The team separates to amble around aimlessly, with Hutch ending up in the House of the Dead, and Boss Guy exploring a torture chamber downstairs.
“I’m outta goddamn roses,” he blusters, heading in anyway. Bathory promptly appears out of nowhere, speeds across the room and knifes him in the throat. Game Over!
All together now… Restore, Restart, Quit! Sierra Sudden Death Syndroooomme....
LET ME OUT OF THIS MOVIE!
It’s worth pointing out here that Bathory is one of the crappiest villains ever seen in a horror movie - including the lovesick Djinn from Wishmaster IV. She kills people in insanely boring, bland as hell ways, usually just stabbing them or trying to hit them with her horse and carriage, and usually with a quick cut-away, because the producers weren’t allowed to show gore. Why? Beats me. With one exception, it seems entirely pointless. Maybe she just enjoys the thrill of the hunt, as endlessly shown in the five minute long ‘Boss Guy Keeps Running Into Cheap Fake Scares Before Dying Off-Screen’ sequence that now plays out. Either way, like all the death scenes in this movie, it’s tamer than a pet rat called Tinkerbell.
Even so, Boss Guy is shaken by his vaguely defined end and drops out. Back at Stately Wayne Steamboy Advert, the rest of the Victim Roster decides that they’ve also had enough game for one day, and go their seperate ways while Irritating Brat starts babbling about something called ‘perceptive reality’ in a bizarre attempt to ground this movie in it. Two letters out…
(Incidentally, the game they were playing? It bears almost no relation to the one Loomis lasted ten seconds in back at the start of the movie. For starters, in this version, the Victim Roster is armed to the teeth, making the correct response to seeing Bathory show up “Die, bitch,” instead of “Aaaiiieee, Mommy!")
The next morning, the boss’ corpse is discovered, and it’s time for the bit where the characters all snigger at the idea that the game may be responsible. Shockingly, there’s a couple of cops - Stupid White Cop and More Rational Black Cop - who suspect that they may have something to do with the murder, and a fake-out scene where Really Annoying Brother looks like he’s dead, but really isn’t. Most original plotting ever!
Hutch uses the search engine Dogpile (Product! Placement!) to search for details on Loomis’ death, and quickly gets his hands on the police report. At first, I thought he’d hacked into it via the search engine; instead, it’s even sillier - in Stay Alive’s universe, the NOPD sticks all its casefiles, corpse photos, and even evidence on-line for what must have looked like a mix of murder and suicide. Your tax dollars at work, people. Snuff porn served up by Uncle Sam.
But hey, what would I know?
The ‘natural skepticism’ part of the movie thankfully over, the characters are finally up to speed with what the audience knew from the trailer. Really Annoying Brother is the next to go. This would normally be cause for celebration, but there’s a catch. As Goth Chick points out “You didn’t die in the game, remember?”
This little quibble proves not to matter to Bathory, still on her epic quest to remove annoying teenagers from horror movies for frankly no good reason. She shows up anyway, and earns fifty points for running him over in her ghostly horse and carriage. Sadly, in the process she also entirely destroys the premise of the movie, and earns herself a big fat CHEATER on the serial killer high-score table in Hell.
But at least Really Annoying Brother is gone, so overall, I approve.
The two cops show up again, hear the kids’ ‘evil game’ explanation, and declare it to be complete bollocks. Stupid White Cop even sits down and plays the game for a couple of minutes on Irritating Brat’s shiny chrome Alienware laptop (Product! Placement!), and yet again, it’s completely different. This time he magically gets into the torture chamber and killed faster than the kids dealt with one single Scary Little Girl. Hell, he’s so bad at games, neither Bathory or her Scary Little Girls bother to show up. He just happily sits down in an evil torture chair and gets his virtual face ripped open for his trouble. This is easily Liz’ most unpleasant virtual kill, even if we can seriously credit her with it, so it’s no shock that when Stupid White Cop gets his, it’s off camera.
Before that treat however, we have to head for a comic relief sequence in a video store, seemingly put there only to slip in yet more Product! Placement! for Unreal Championship 2, Nvidia, Killzone, and most of all, an audience the makers of this film spend its whole running time showing complete and utter contempt for. The game store clerk is a little hyperactive troll, talking about games in drug terms, while Stupid White Cop claims to have won the Greater Louisiana Q-Bert championships in his youth. Er… sure. On being asked about Stay Alive itself, Troll Clerk hisses excitedly, hinting that it might be “Underground,” and for the first time, I actually start feeling sympathetic towards Jack Thompson.
Elsewhere, the Scooby Gang continues its investigation. Amongst their many discoveries are that Bathory really doesn’t like mirrors, that she can be killed by sticking nails into her and then burning her, that Hutch has a sad past that explains why he’s ironically scared of fire, and that Stay Alive’s makers think that www.bellmangames.com is an e-mail address. Oh, and the violent supernatural death of Stupid White Cop sends the whole NOPD after the group, but only for about five minutes or so. That plot element is never seen again, and most of the previous ones are thrown away just as quickly as Bathory materialises in the real world and does away with Goth Chick. Despite some throwaway line about the game not letting you stop playing, the fact remains, she hasn’t died yet. In fact, now the rules flip into reverse, as Bathory kills her in the real world and her avatar merely mirrors it.
I’m dead? But… but Jack Thompson told me games would teach me to kill!
Frankly, this just strikes me as rude. If you’re going to lay down rules and mysterious omens like this whole ‘how you die in the game is how you die in real life’ thing, the least you can do is follow them. Even Angela from the Sleepaway Camp movies - the single most laid back serial killer in movie history - followed the rules. This is like Jason hiring a Yakuza hit squad to take out his victims.
Nevertheless, with Goth Chick gone, we’re finally into the home stretch, with just the Designated Hero and Designated Girl left - two characters we’ve come to feel for, nay, even love, in the course of this movie - along with Irritating Brat, who also survives. Bathory’s stupid computer game promptly changes yet again, as having demonstrated her unstoppable nature and ability to manifest in the real world, she…
...well, doesn’t. For no apparent reason, which incidentally, is also why she’s doing all this silly stuff. She doesn’t want the kids’ blood, she just leaves her victims lying around. If there’s some prophecy or other nonsense to explain her killing spree, it must have been cut out of this version of the movie. As it is, all we’ve got a ghostly Slovakian countess who moved to New Orleans after her death to set up a school for young ladies, and later a games company, to produce a title in which she got to murder irritating kids who gave her money.
Passes the time, I guess.
Figuring out that the Stay Alive developer’s offices may have some clues, the Scooby Gang drives over. Instead of a game studio, Bellman Games turns out to merely be a hilarious portmanteau of the directors’ names - William Bell and Matthew Peterman - as well as a decrepid old townhouse before its annual spring clean. Around the back, apparently unnoticed by anyone for the last two hundred years, is fricking Isengard - and of course, our heroes don’t notice it either. Irritating Brat stays in the car with the game running, realising that it’s an exact 1:1 of the gameworld… supposedly… while the Designated Hero and Designated Girl press on to their fates; to save and be saved respectively.
“Seems like a strange place to make a game,” mutters the Designated Hero, stepping into a room that is - once again - quite blatantly not the game we saw Loomis playing at the start of the movie. It’s your Granny’s house. Right down to the soft furnishings. Honestly, at least Uwe Boll built his crappy scripts around a mine and an island…
Yeah, that’s the smell of cat piss alright…
Aside from chintz, Chez Bathory proves to have everything you’d expect from a game developers studio, including cockroaches, maggots, and action figures of Bathory herself for some reason, but not the woman herself. Irritating Brat decides to help out by using the game… a survival horror game we’ve previously seen as being stuffed full of Scary Little Girls and Sierra Sudden Death Syndrome… to check their route, despite the house being completely deserted and pretty much entirely safe. Luckily, the gameworld version is also now emptier than Alone In The Dark 2, so he’s not instantly ripped to pieces by the armies of the damned.
Back in the real world, we find random props scattered around the place, including plans of the house, dolls - see, Bathory’s a big softie, really - and a motorbike, which is a bit odd for a vampire ghost who’s spent the whole movie riding around in a horse-drawn carriage. We also find out that objects dropped in the game can spontaneously appear in the real world. Which makes no sense, especially at this late stage of the movie, but whatever. End! End! End!
In the very heart of evil, Designated Hero and Designated Girl decide to split up for no apparent reason. She continues wandering around Granny’s house, unarmed, alone, and out of contact with the heroic menfolk… oops… while he heads for the graveyard, and finally notices the giant black tower casting shadows over the whole of Louisiana. The Designated Girl finally gets caught when she stumbles into Bathory’s hidden study - a spacious little alcove full of pictures of herself, her diary, inkwells, and assorted other plans, and presumably a copy of C# For Dummies to help her make the game in the first place. No computers though, so presumably she just plucked the code out of her ass.
You know what game you’re thinking of…
Fantasy and reality continue their unexplained, poorly handled merger deal as the Designated Girl is captured, and Irritating Brat saves her using the roses from the start of the movie. Again, I question Bathory’s tactics throughout this murder spree. If I ever make a game as revenge against the world, I will not include my one weakness as an inventory object, nor make it a mandatory tutorial at the very start. I shall pretend to be allergic to being fed delicious chocolate. Unless…
Wait a moment! Go Lizzy! Back in the real world, Irritating Brat ends up running through the woods, gets tangled in an actual prickly rose bush, and gets Bathoried! Hah! So much for ghosts not being able to cross rose stems, Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle! Maybe our Liz is smarter than I gave her credit for…
Viva Pinata!
Designated Hero and Designated Girl head into Isengard, where Designated Girl’s gender soon gets the better of her and she gets trapped in a torture chamber. Being a girl, and a female girl at that, she sits back uselessly with her last rose; her one defence against the darkness… and starts picking the petals off, going “He loves me, he loves me not.” I’m totally on Bathory’s side now. Get those meddling kids, Liz! Go Lizzy! Go Lizzy!
At the top of Isengard, Designated Hero finally discovers Bathory’s body, weighed down with enough white make-up to coat a small country. He puts down Irritating Brat’s chrome Alienware laptop, and begins very, very slowly knocking nails into her. Downstairs, Bathory’s spirit form has caught up with Designated Girl, hanging her upside down so that her shirt almost but not quite falls down over her chest, and very, very slowly prepares to kill her. Very slowly. Very slowly. Veeeery slooowly.
We cut between the two endlessly slow scenes for no apparent reason, pausing only to blink in bemusement as we cut back to the Designated Girl to find Bathory standing there stark naked, supposedly trying to drain Designated Girl’s blood into a big bathtub for a refreshing soak, but mostly looking like the world’s most embarassing continuity goof for the two seconds the shot lasts.
With the last nail in Bathory’s head, Designated Hero is in trouble. Behind him, the body sits up. The nails push out of her head. Slowly.... Carefully…
Remember how Bathory hated mirrors? It’s from a while ago. Well, guess what he does. Go on. Guess. I guarantee, it’s even stupider than you think.
Give up? Okay.
He spins round and shows her her reflection in the Alienware’s chrome finish.
PRODUCT! PLACEMENT! ULTRA-KILL!
And that about wraps it up for Bathory. Designated Hero sweeps a little cigarette lighter across the floor, where it ignites a lake of petrol he never actually put down. Bravely, he faces his fear of fire by sitting in the corner and sobbing to himself until, out of nowhere, Designated Girl and Irritating Brat burst in and-
Wait, what? But… But Irritating Brat got Bathoried! We saw his Game Over screen! She tracked him down and… with her blades… and… and… and Designated Girl was hanging by chains from the roof, behind a locked door! How did they… the door was…
You know, I’m starting to think this movie might not be very good. Irritating Brat is still wrapped in a fricking rosebush, Designated Girl is with him, and somewhere, a cutting room floor presumably holds the lost footage that might make sense of this surreal coda. Our heroes leave Isengard, happily walking back to a civilised world where they’re wanted for savagely murdering a cop and all their friends, and their only excuse is “An evil ghost vampire who emigrated here from Slovakia to set up a girls’ school on a Louisiana plantation so she’d have blood to bathe in, only then she apparently got bored and decided to make an evil computer game that we-”
And they pirated the game too. They’re hosed.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Stay Alive without more Product! Placement!, and it wouldn’t be a horror movie without the threat of a sequel. Back to the games store we go, back to where our friendly troll store owner who unfortunately survived the movie is unpacking a giant cardboard box. Gee, I wonder what’s in it…
Yep, while killing off the Victim Roster, good old Liz still had time to finish coding and bug-testing the game, and do a publicity tour that netted her front-page coverage in the national press (even if it is only on Game Informer). Game Store Troll happily wanders across past the Unreal Championship Product! Placement! and the Area-51 Product! Placement! and drops the disc in the drive.
I wonder if she let their reviewer off the whole ‘death and torture’ bit in the name of good press relations. Probably not…
And so we end on one final humiliation… the game is different yet again. Not only is it now a PS2 game rather than the PC game it’s been all movie, the whole intro has been redone for extra ‘stinger ending’ oomph. This time, we sweep all the way up to Isengard’s window, where Bathory stares out at the world. No title screen. No prayer.
Hmm. So, does this mean there was one of her instanced for each of the kids, rather than just one vengeful spirit shared between them? And that her plans to return to the mortal world and wreak vaguely defined vengeance basically just involve hitting the shelves at full price, eventually being passed down to the budget bin, and eventually being consigned to the turnabout hell of eBay?
Ms. Bathory, you are the lamest horror villain ever. Get the hell out of my DVD player before I turn your game into a Frisbee and watch you get eaten by a dog.
POSTSCRIPT: After this post was linked from GameSetWatch, I noticed this. Check the comments, and most importantly, the dates. Viral marketing, anybody? Please let it be viral marketing, because the idea that actual gamers are still so hooked on this shitty, shitty movie is just too depressing to contemplate. I can safely say, this recap was not paid for by the makers, although I wouldn’t complain if they’d like to refund my rental fee, plus the cost of a Cherry Coke and pack of Malteasers. Thanks.