Stay Alive Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I hate it when someone comes up with an idea so simple and clever that I want to kick myself for not thinking of it first. Curse you, Adam Green! His next feature is called Frozen, and here's what it's about: Three poor folks who are stuck on a chair lift. High off the ground. In the freezing cold. Like for days. (Think on that premise for a few minutes. I think it's nifty. Like Open Water with hypothermia instead of sharks.) Frozen will be the first production for a company called A Bigger Boat, which is run by Peter Block, who had a real knack for horror films when he worked for Lionsgate. So this is good news all around.

Andy Fickman directs mostly family-type comedies, so what's he doing remaking RKO classics like The Body Snatcher and I Walked With a Zombie? Check out this interview to find out. Almost two years ago I wrote about a new horror flick called Amusement. Looks like it's finally ready for DVD. Cool: Bloody-D has a Top 13 Best Kills list -- complete with clips! Hey wow, Dark Castle to do a non-remake. And then just for fun let's watch the adorable Stacie Ponder go nutso on Amityville and Sleepaway Camp. Plus Saw is infinitely better than Psycho. This poll proves it. Anyone remember that awful horror flick Stay Alive? This poor sap does.

...oh, and you'll never guess who's playing Thor. Seriously, never.

P.S. Guess what's coming out on October 23rd, 2009. Here's a hint: Saw 6.

Recent Theatricals

Hard Candy (Lionsgate) -- Ice-blooded chiller about a potential pedophile and the turning of tables. (two commentaries, documentary, featurette, deleted scenes)

Loverboy (Universal) -- Smothery mother slowly turns creepy. Kyra Sedgwick does some great work here. (director's commentary)

The Proposition (First Look) -- Reeks of Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill. And is a damn fine film. (filmmaker commentary, five featurettes, deleted scenes)

Stay Alive (Disney) -- They made a horror movie out of that silly old marble game? (filmmaker commentary, FX reel)

Stick It (Disney) -- No, you stick it. I got good movies to watch. (two commentaries, blooper reel, featurette, deleted scenes)

Catalog Picks

Backdraft (Universal) -- Ron Howard gets fiery and throws a little Lecter in there. (director's intro, deleted scenes, five featurettes)

Boris Karloff Collection (Universal) -- Includes Night Key (1937), Tower of London (1939), The Climax (1944), The Strange Door (1954) and The Black Castle (1952). (trailers)

Chucky Killer Collection (Universal) -- Includes Child's Play 2 (1990), Child's Play 3 (1991), Bride of Chucky (1998) and Seed of Chucky (2004). (Because the original is an MGM title, that's why.) (all the extras from the previous releases, which (on parts 4 and 5) are a lot)

Grease: Rockin' Rydell Edition (Paramount) -- Otherwise known as: The Edition They Should Have Released Five Years Ago. (four featurettes, deleted & extended scenes, DVD launch party footage, trailers)

It seems a  fairly obvious observation, but horror flicks are pretty "hot" these days. The current cycle of scary flicks can be attributed to box office hits like Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James Wan's Saw, and probably a half-dozen others, but moreso than any other genre, the popularity of horror movies seems to arrive in "waves." Apparently we're knee-deep in one of those waves right now. And now with one quarter of 2006 behind us, it's time for the first of four "progress reports," in which you and I wade through all the horror flicks presented in January, February, and March, and then decide if the studios and the indies have been treating the Gorehounds kindly.

1/6/06 -- BloodRayne (Romar) -- Kristanna Loken, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez, and Michael Madsen humiliate themselves through the latest hilariously bad offering from the adorably inept filmmaker known as Uwe Boll. (It's a horror movie in that it features vampires -- and it's an absolute horror to sit through.) Jam-packed with laughable dialogue, dime-store costumes, non-sensical plot-churnings, and hyper-inept editing, BloodRayne is the kind of flick that should be required viewing for any and all film students. It's precisely the sort of movie that's so bad it's good -- although I suspect Boll is beginning to do "amazingly awful" on purpose, which sort of takes some of the fun out of it... Grade: D- (DVD release: 5-23)

(The above image is from Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. Aren't you glad you won't be seeing it?)

Here's a shock: of the three major releases this weekend, neither Health Inspector nor Stay Alive (Inside Man is the third) was screened for critics. Stay Alive, like most of the relatively cheap, audience-pleasing horror flicks that have been released in the past year or so, promises sadism, blood and, if you're lucky, pretty young girls threatened with sexual violence - really, do you need critics to tell you that? And anyone who goes to see Health Inspector after seeing the ads (Sushi is raw? Hilarious!) doesn't deserve to be warned by critics anyway. So, in sum: Health Inspector (presumably) sucks, Stay Alive (most likely) sucks and, what do you know, Spike Lee can make a movie that's nothing more than slick and fun to watch!

• Inside Man: Like James, the great majority of critics really, really like this one. The lovers describe it variously as a "crackling heist thriller", "the kind of seamless diversion that should be a stock item in Hollywood, but isn't", and "flawlessly cast and marvelously acted and directed", all of which are the kind of praise about which filmmakers dream. Just to make sure Lee doesn't get too big for his proverbial britches, however, there are a few who don't love it, the most negative of whom - the very angry Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian - turns in the kind of review that could crush a young director's very soul. Try this, for example, on for size: "You could try emptying Lake Victoria with a teaspoon...or getting into your house with front-door key made of marzipan. Any of these activities would be less of a waste of time than watching this supremely annoying and nonsensical film from Spike Lee." OUCH. I think I'm shaking a little bit, just out of sympathy.
  

In an attempt to utilize some alternate means of advertising, Disney has employed Myspace to create some buzz for their upcoming horror flick, Stay Alive. Stay Alive tells the story of a group of friends who discover a brutal video game which turns deadly - the gamers die as their characters in the game die. The main character of the film is be a guy named Hutch, who now has his very own Myspace, in which he has been chronicling a few events leading up to the story of the film. Hutch uses the About Me section of his site to explain that he's a horror genre fanatic; he loves scary movies and games, listing Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 4 among his favorites. He goes on to say that he's recently got his hands on a beta version of a new horror game called Stay Alive, which a friend had been testing for the company that produced it. He says he's never seen anything like this game in terms of brutal horror; "if there was a line, this game leaped over it and turned around to take a piss on it."

It's becoming more and more common for studios to use the internet as a forum for advertising, which makes plenty of sense since today's younger generations practically live online. I've personally never gotten into the Myspace fad, but I know that it is quite the popular site, so it seems like an obvious choice for such a venture. Are such "alternate" means of advertising successful? It's probably far to early to find any concrete stats on that yet, but I'll say this: Hutch has good taste - RE4 was a fantastic game.

Actress Samaire Armstrong's birthday is on Halloween - it's fitting, then, that when she first became an actress she really wanted to do a horror flick. The young actress scored double in that regard and can soon be seen in both Stay Alive and Rise, two upcoming horror movies. However, Armstrong recently told Sci Fi Wire that she was finished with genre and had no plans to return to it. In fact, she was quite emphatic about the point, saying "I will never do a scary movie again, I'm really serious. I will NEVER do one again. I don't see any conditions or circumstances that could change my mind about that." Armstrong admits that despite her desire to do a horror film, she has never been a big fan of the genre, and says that filming her recent movies provided a number of spooky experiences that she does not want to repeat. She says "You get to the point where you do too many seances or play with the Ouija board, and that's enough."

This makes perfect sense to me. I don't tend to watch many horror flicks, but I can understand wanting to avoid them after too much exposure, especially if you are the sort of person who gets spooked easily. For those of you who are made of more solid stuff, however, you can catch Stay Alive on March 24th, and Rise later this year.

In a twist on the standard "turn your hot movie property into a quick video game junker to capitalize on whatever popularity you can seize" storyline, the creators of the upcoming faux-horror adventure flick Stay Alive hope to turn the video game at the center of their movie's plot into a real life video game. In the movie, characters quickly discover that if they lose ("die"- whatever) while playing a certain video game, gruesome deaths likewise occur in real life. Thus can the creators market a video game based on the movie with (presumably) a slightly better ploy than "hey, it has the same name as the movie." They envision a video game more thoroughly connected to the movie, with the film containing hints to hidden secrets and unlockables within the game itself.

Clever? Sure, I suppose so. Although the idea of  "see, it's just like the game in the movie" will probably fade rather quickly when people around you don't start dying as you play. I doubt I'll end up giving this one a try, but  hey...at least it has a little more thought than the usual tie-in, right?