Stay Alive

1 of 1

We know the feeling

Once in every while a film comes out which is so bad you owe it to yourself to make time in your schedule for it. Such a fiasco restores your faith that the crap films you like really aren't that crap at all; that you could easily make better and that awful movies are usually funnier than most Hollywood comedies. 'Stay Alive' is a hands (thumbs) down winner in every category.

Bizarrely, the plot is half decent. After playing a mysterious, in development horror video game called 'Stay Alive', a college student and his two roommates are found murdered. His grieving pal (Foster) takes possession of the game and, along with a gang of joystick junkies (Muniz, Armstrong, Simpson, Bush), decides to play it - only to discover that the phrase 'Game Over' has a more sinister meaning for them.

For 15 minutes this looks like another unremarkable teen horror, but thereafter 'Stay Alive' shows that it has a lot more to offer. Cut from the director's planned R rating to get a PG-13 cert in the US, the film has a distinct lack of gore but, fret not, the atrocious performances and pacing more than compensate for the absence of claret. Lines of dialogue fall like lump hammers on a floor; the over-acting gets funnier by the minute and the whole thing feels like it was thrown together in a weekend - paper aeroplanes have been constructed better.

The obvious temptation is to rename it 'Stay Awake' but that would be an injustice: you'll be too busy laughing to think about sleeping.

Harry Guerin