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Parents' Guide to

Stay Alive

By Cynthia Fuchs, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Ridiculous slasher flick. Teens, go elsewhere.

Movie PG-13 2006 85 minutes
Stay Alive Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

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age 14+

Based on 2 parent reviews

TV-14-DLSV Teen Boy
TV-14-DLSV Teen Boy Adult
April 1, 2012
age 15+

Cool Movie.

Stay Alive is a Good Slasher Movie FOR OLDER TEENS. I have the unrated version though. But I think It's Too Strong to be RATED: PG-13. I Really Recommend This Movie.

This title has:

Great messages
Great role models
Too much violence
Too much drinking/drugs/smoking
Plague
Plague Parent
December 3, 2009
age 12+

Stay Alive

My kid wanted to see this movie for his 8th birthday (go figure), so we did. He must have loved the movie, but I though it was pretty cheesey. The story within the game itself is alright, but the whole real life to video game storyline just doesnt suit a movie well. This might be a good movie for creepy video game fans.
See all 2 parent reviews

What's the Story?

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.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (2 ):
Kids say (9 ):

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.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the relationships between friends and, in one case, sister and brother. How do these bonds lead them to investigate the murders and then get in trouble? How can video games or other media affect your sense of reality and responsibility, or your social life?

Movie Details

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