Stay Alive (PG-13, 2006)

When a nerdishly enthusiastic player (Milo Ventimiglia) tries the unreleased video game "Stay Alive," he and two friends end up viciously murdered, a new crew gets hold of the game, including earnest Hutch (Jon Foster), dorky Phineus (Jimmi Simpson) and tech-head Swink (Frankie Muniz). The requisite girls are Phin's gothy sister October (Sophia Bush) and last minute tagalong Abigail (Samaire Armstrong). When Phin insists that they should all game in honor of their fallen gamer friend, the game provides them with muscular avatars, guns and crossbows, then leads them to a terrible place featuring a dungeon, torture, and mayhem, where they start dying in real life the ways they die in the game.

Ridiculous and then some, STAY ALIVE offers the usual slasher movie set-up: young people making one wrong decision after another. Here they're up against a video game character, the "Blood Countess" (Maria Kalinina), complete with red gown and pasty face. She's based on a real life Hungarian serial killer, transferred to New Orleans (where some of the film was shot, just before Hurricane Katrina hit last year), and is accompanied by ghosts of her victims, little girls in white dresses and J-horror-styled stringy hair.

The painfully necessary romance between Hutch and Abigail slows down the action somewhat, especially as she must send him forth to fight the Countess on his own, while she stays behind in a barred room and counts off rose petals to the hackneyed tune of "He loves me, he loves me not." This just before Swink comes back from the apparent dead, to restore the endangered pretty couple. Why, we'll never know.