Why It Wasn't Scary: Despite a few decent actors being roped into this mess (Frankie Muniz, Adam Goldberg, Wendell Pierce and Milo Ventimiglia), Stay Alive is a lame-brained horror disaster, revolving around a video game in which, if you die, then you actually die in real life. Still, most of the deaths occur off-screen because of the PG-13 rating, the CGI is distractingly terrible and anyone who isn't one of the four aforementioned actors is irredeemably awful (not that they fare particularly well either). Also the plot is mostly incoherent and doesn't make a lot of sense: the characters who need to survive are handed get-out clauses out of nowhere, and it painfully fails to connect with the teen gamer audience it so desperately wants to. How To Improve It: Go hard or go home: either release it R-rated or don't bother, hire better actors, have a firmer grasp on the internal logic of the "you die in the game, you die in real life" gimmick, and actually convince audiences that someone associated with the production has actually played a video game at least once in their life.
Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes).
General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.
