STAY ALIVE
How’s this for the premise of a trashy horror movie? A group of friends get a hold of an indie video game, but if you die in the game, you die in real life. Not bad, huh? You know what is bad though? Stay Alive, the movie with that exact premise.
Stay Alive should be a lot more fun than it is, it is mostly a chore to sit there as this premise is squandered. This movie is from that weird era of 2006 where the graphics of pretend video games looked dopey, but also the graphics of real life games were also still kind of dopey. It’s a tough break. The movie would be better off with its characters unearthing an unreleased game from the 1997 so that it makes sense why the graphics were so bad. Maybe this crew could get their hands on the original Daikatana.
Maybe I shouldn’t just write myself into this movie, maybe we need to figure out a way where I can go back and rewrite this entire movie before it comes out. Can I make this movie? Some people want to time travel for all sorts of reasons, I want to time travel so I can wrestle creative control of Stay Alive away from William Brent Bell. I’d storm right up to the producers and demand they make my version, and I would then also insist that they fire the entire cast except for Frankie Muniz, who I would then make play all of the parts Nutty Professor II: The Klumps style.
There is absolutely no reason to mention this at all, but one of the producers of Stay Alive is McG. McG directed Charlie’s Angels back in 2000 and years ago I read somebody refer to McG as “the hamburger who directs” and that has brought me great joy over the years every time I see his name. Which, to be honest, is not very often. McG has had a much smaller cultural impact than I thought he was going to back in the early 2000s.
Where would I fit into this? I mean, playing this goddamn game, obviously. Give me a PC, and a disc full of demos and I would have played every single one of them. I absolutely would have loved the chance to play the game Stay Alive. Would I have done it in the weird ass way they play games in this movie? By all sitting around on the couch watching one of their friends play? Absolutely not.
IF I WERE IN ‘STAY ALIVE’ I WOULD: NOT BE DEAD AND HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF MY ACTIONS AND PAY THROUGH THE NOSE FOR A NEW COMPUTER WHICH WOULD BECOME SEEMINGLY OBSOLETE THE MOMENT I STARTED USING IT. OH AND MY FRIENDS WOULD ALL DIE BECAUSE OF A CURSED VIDEO GAME LEAVING ME WITH NO FRIENDS ON MSN MESSENGER
