5/5 thoughts.
  by A. Potts (Pennslyvaina, USA.)
The main thing i liked about this movie was how they tied the history of Elizabeth Bathory(one of my ancsters) into the plot line.
However, Eliazbeth WAS NOT AMERICAN!
so why was the setting of the film in america!? Lol. She was romanian, and I'm pretty sure she was hungarian as well.
The actors were alright, but, why frankie muinz? oh god. Lol!
over all, my dvd arrived a few days after ordering it, brand new.
AND IT WAS NOT BOOTLEGGED.



2/5 Affirrmative Action
  by Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States)
Astoundingly bad horror film with a good title, and a complete waste of time, Stay Alive is to be applauded for giving dozens of Louisianans their first real film work after Hurricane Katrina came in and tore up the delta. When Milo stumbles on a video game called Stay Alive, he is driven to hang himself just as his character in the game, and his housemates are found savagely hacked to death. Jon Foster, his best friend, wonders what could have made Mile commit suicide, for he was always a cheerful boy without a care in the world. At the funeral he meets the bizarre and annoying Samaire Armstrong, who is photographing all the mourners with an old fashioned camera I thought was going to eventually prove she was evil, or came from another dimension, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong and I don't mind admitting it. What was the reason for her being a photographer, I wonder. Some reviewers have said that her camera is a clever visual reference to a previous video game or horror movie in which the heroine sports a similar outmoded box camera. Wouldn't you think that her camera would wind up solving the mystery? No, that was not in the version of Screenwriting 101 that these bozos took, or perhaps they only went to the class in which they were told, hire the very worst actors available to you at all times.

In fact I used to like Jon Foster, especially in that movie where he was hired by Jeff Bridges essentially to babysit his mentally troubled wife Kim Basinger. Sexy! And indeed I used to like Samaire Armstrong on The O.C. The other actors, Sophia Bush as a goth babe called Öctober, the Malcolm in the Middle kid, now grown up and uglier than a crawfish, and whoever the brother was of October who gets run down by a stagecoach, they should all resign from acting. Adam Goldberg has a bit part in this--just asking for death. And how did they manage to rig up the plot so there are absolutely no black people in Louisiana I wonder, beyond Bunk from The Wire, who is probably wishing that Paul Chan's avant-garde production of Waiting for Godot on the banks of the broken levee paid a little bit more. The evil blood countess Elizabeth Bathory is the villain here, the mistress of a pre Civil war plantation at which, looks like, only white girls worked. What? White slavery in the old South? Weren't black people good enough even to be slaves?


3/5 Stay Alive
  by Elizabeth (USA)
After the death of a friend, five twenty-somethings plug in to the cursed video game that killed him.

Okay, so that sounds like a stupid premise. And yes, there are times the writing lives down to the genre's expectations. Yet, there's still something intriguing about the story, the mythology used to build it, and the ways in which the old school (ancient curse) and new school (video games) meet head on.

Not Oscar-worthy, but not a bad waste of a few hours, either.

4/5 Entertaining
  by KAS (Tuscaloosa, AL)
This is not a movie that will ever win any great awards, but I like it. It's very entertaining, and it has some amusing characters. I think that with a bigger budget and a little more plot, they could have really made this a pretty good movie.

5/5 Awesome Gaming Horror
  by Angel Greene (USA)
I loved this movie! A great storyline, twists, turns, and a solid ending that delivered, big time. I liked how they even incorrporated some real life into it, the Elizabeth Bathory chick was real, she even was a covicted mass murderer and was locked up in her tower like in the movie, look the bitch up on Wiki.