Product Details

• Actors: Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong, Frankie Muniz, Jimmi Simpson, Wendell Pierce
• Directors: William Brent Bell
• Writers: William Brent Bell, Matthew Peterman
• Producers: Adam Del Deo, Adolfo Martínez Pérez, Anna Mastro, Becki Cross Trujillo, David Manpearl
• Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Hollywood
• DVD Release Date: September 19, 2006
• Run Time: 85 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005JOWW
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,404 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Stay Alive - The Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

STAY ALIVE - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great movie, especially for gamers, January 25, 2008

By 

Pugmom "lover of dogs, books and horror movies" (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stay Alive - The Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

I seem to be in the minority, but I thought this movie was awesome. Maybe it's because I play a lot of computer games and I thought the premise of a killer video game was really clever (maybe not unique, but well done.)

The plot revolves around a mysterious video game being tested by a couple of game testers. No one seems to know its origin, but it soon becomes apparent that when you play the game and your character dies, you soon meet the same fate in real life. The game is based on the real-life serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian countess who killed and tortured hundreds of girls. The movie takes some liberty with the facts, such as having The Countess, as she's called, move to America, where she finds the requisite spooky old manor to inhabit. The gamers finally figure out what's going on and find the real-life burial place of the Countess. One part I found cool was that while one character played the game on his laptop, he instructed the other one what to do in the actual castle. I found the blending of game and "reality" very well-done and intriguing. I won't spoil the ending, but the heroes eventually find the body of the actual Countess, and guess what- she's not dead! (surprise) There is a pretty cool final scene where they battle this vicious vixen, who I thought was one of the coolest movie monsters I've seen in a while.

Also included on this DVD is a commentary track, which I found very entertaining. A mixture of teen slasher film, video come to life, and techno-thriller.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars BETTER THAN I THOUGHT... but not without problems, November 12, 2006

By 

Chris Kennison (Jefferson City, Mo United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stay Alive - The Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

First of all, I didn't have too high of hopes for STAY ALIVE going in. I had heard numerous negative reviews and I can't stand the ARROGANT and works more than he deserves to FRANKIE MUNIZ. By the way, Frankie must have the greatest agent of all time. Not only does he keep working, but he manages to get a pivotal part in this movie when he should have been one of the death scenes.

STAY ALIVE actually has a pretty fun premise. Ridiculous. Yes. A ripoff of THE RING. A little bit. Yet, if you can manage to remember that your watching a movie and can forget reality for a couple of hours, STAY ALIVE actually is pretty fun and actually has a really effective and scary edge to it. In fact, the whole story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Maria Kalinina) is very intriguing, disturbing and a tremendous idea to build a scary movie around. The moments when she appears, or just stands in a corner in her bright red victorian dress are frightening.

The movie centers around an underground video game that seems to reach beyond the PS2 console and effect real life. A ghost story bottled into a video game disc.

So, where does STAY ALIVE go wrong? Many places... and that's the problem. They took this incredible premise of a women who thinks the blood of young girls can keep her young, and wasted it. That to me is the biggest problem. They wasted a FANTASTIC chance to do something cool and unique, and instead did what all scary movies do... wasted time explaining and showing the unknowing characters trying to get each other to believing each other and much worse, getting the authorities to believe them.

Instead, they should have spent more time INSIDE THE GAME!! They should have abandoned the real life encounters and delved into a COOL WORLDish situation. They should have teamed up with the animators of the FINAL FANTASY MOVIES and did something cool, and more importantly, something unforgettable.

The story behind the game was enough to suffice. It was the coolest part of the movie, but 30 minutes in, the characters strapped into their headsets, grabbed their controllers, played for 3 minutes and quit.

This is where the movie, to me, didn't stay alive. It died. It lost its edge and got boring. Up to the point when they got into the game, I was glued. I liked it, despite goofball Frankie Muniz sitting there with his viser on sideways and talking. The moment the movie quit relying on the game to tell the story, the movie died.

Finally, sure, I didn't like that Frankie Muniz was in the movie, but the fact that he or his agent managed to talk the directors or writers into giving him this pivotal part at the end of the film and made him seem like the hero of the film seemed like just that... like an agent or himself had used their pull to weasel him into that final scene. Ridiculous and unnecessary. It was enough for me to hate the movie, just the fact that he didn't buy it.

This could have been a really good film, but the creators made a lot of ill choices and it should have been better. I took 2 stars away for the lack of video game realiance, and another for Frankie Muniz not dieing.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Affirrmative Action, March 23, 2009

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stay Alive - The Director's Cut (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

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?