Will video games ever translate to the big screen? Since at least Tron in 1982, or more recently Super Mario Bros. in 1993, filmmakers have been trying to capture or recreate, I don’t know which, something about the video game experience. The need has become even more urgent in recent years as video game playing has come to exceed movie going as the youth leisure activity of choice. But then, filmmakers have also been trying to adapt comic books to the screen, too, without much success, be it 1936 or 2006. Though whereas the comic book hero offers the allure of ready made heroic characters and stories, the attraction of the video game to a filmmaker must be something akin to the magic of immersion into a different world, the “fish out of water” theme that was the linchpin of 1980s cinema.

Despite the fact that occasionally a filmmaker, such as Robert Montgomery in Lady In the Lake in 1947 or Brian De Palma in the recent The Black Dahlia, embraces the same impulse as one that drives many of the video games available (“you are there” POV cameras, for example), there is still a terrible gap between “movie,” as such, which instills a level of physical passivity in the viewer, and “game,” in which participation is the whole point. But these days even narrative, the bedrock of commercial cinema, is stronger in video games than in most of the movies made, and it appears that when our youth go to spin their stories they do so at Sega rather than Sony Columbia.
But if the video game movie is a thin, dissicated genre, it nevertheless already has its female icon, German actress Alice Krige. She appears in both Stay Alive and Silent Hill, two recent films, the first about gaming, the second based on a game. In the first she has a cameo as a Wicca-style store owner who provides crucial plot-driving information in one scene. In Silent Hill she is the grand matriarch of a ghostly village.

In some ways, Stay Alive is an admirable picture. It is one of some 20 films made at least partially in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina (according to the film’s commentary track, anyway), from the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Just My Luck to The Guardian. But unlike other recent films set in the region, such as Skeleton Key, Stay Alive doesn’t even really feel like it is set in the south. There is a lushly acquitted plantation-like house with a long drive way that opens the film, but the rest is … just anonymous American City.

 

 

But then, one is grateful for that simplicity because otherwise Stay Alive can’t even make sense of its own premise. The eponymous bootleg video game, Stay Alive, unofficially based on Fatal Frame, is somehow the ghostly embodiment of Elizabeth Bathory, the 17th century Hungarian serial killer who has been the subject of many a movie from Countess Dracula (1970, with Ingrid Pitt), to apparently the forthcoming Saw III, but who here is imagined to have, instead of dying in solitary confinement in 1614, fled to Lousiana to continue her virgin bloodletting rituals.

 

 

Somehow her spirit went from the plantation seen at the start of the film (and later) into the video game designed by the guy living there. Thereafter, anyone who plays the game dies in the real world the way he does in the game itself, be it by Saw-style mouth pincers to horse drawn carriages. How does this happen? How does the spirit of a killer reach out of a video console to slay victims in the real world? How does a “spirit” inside a video game make car doors and such close in the physical realm? And what are the rules? If Bathory is killed in the demo, as she is finally at the end of the film, will she still be in the final release of the game, shown in the film’s coda on video store walls? Stay Alive raises the same confusing issues that most Asian horror films do, but not because of cultural differences; no, here it is because the concept appears not to be fully thought out.

We first learn of the horror of the game when Hutch O’Neill (Jon Foster) learns that his childhood friend has died under bizarre circumstances. At the funeral the victim’s little sister gives Hutch a box of the friend’s stuff, including the beta or tester version of Stay Alive. Back in “New Orleans,” Hutch meets up with his Goth girlfriend, October Bantum (Sophia Bush), and her offensive “truth”-speaking “witty” brother Phineas (Jimmi Simpson), a common figure in teen comedies and slasher films. Joined by Swink Sylvania — God, the names in this film — (TV’s Frankie Muniz), the team settles in to play the game, joined by Hutch’s lawyer boss and gamer addict Miller Banks (Adam Goldberg), and the waif Hutch meets at the funeral, Abigail (TV’s Samaire Armstrong). The film at first hints that Abigail has inside knowledge of the game and may be an “agent” of Bathory, but in the end, she is just another chick who wants to fuck the somber Hutch, possibly because the filmmakers changed their minds halfway through. When bodies start to falls, Bunk Moreland drops down from Baltimore in the form of Detective Thibodeaux, played by Wendell Pierce, whose real world relatives were struck by Katrina.

Stay Alive’s widescreen widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) is adequate, as is the Dolby Digital 5.1; it is also closed captioned, and has English, Spanish, and French subtitles.

Supplements are twofold. There is a three minute “visual effects reel,” which is like a music video showing (and then re-showing, and then re-showing again), some of the root imagery built on by the filmmakers. Secondly, there is an audio commentary track by co-writer and director William Brent Bell and co-writer and producer Matthew Peterman, son of the catalog entrepreneur. They don’t exactly make the movie make better sense, and really go wild, though it might be in a mock bloodlust fashion, over the “kills.”

Stay Alive, in its unrated director’s cut, hit the street on Tuesday, September 19th, for $29.95; it’s also available in a full frame theatrical release which is apparently much different from the preferred version.

 

 

Silent Hill I reviewed upon its theatrical release . Suffice it to say here that its problems are those of most movies these days, i.e., that it doesn’t make any sense, it feels ad hoc, that it is both boring and unscary. I would argue, however, that it is better viewed on the DVD player than, despite its occasional photographic beauty, on the big screen. Since it is trying to capture the mood of a video game, the intimacy of the little screen in your own home, does contribute to the uneasiness that the movie conspires to recreate, very much so thanks to the unnerving music the movie inherits from the game, by Akira Yamaoka.

My problem is that I really wanted to like Silent Hill, if not other reason than that it was written by Roger Avary. I don’t think he licked it. I am uncertain how much he really knew or understood or respected the game itself. In the “making of,” he says that he was trying to capture the spirit of the game, but if the film does, it is through the visual affects, camera movements and sound production, rather than the story, which is changed quite a bit from the game’s narrative. Here, Radha Mitchell as Rose Da Silva represents the viewer and gamer, trying to get from one scene to another based on clues unveiled in the current scene. The problem, for me anyway, is that there really isn’t much of a connection from scene to scene, as if the film veered off course numerous times during its making. Why an army of killer nurses? Is it just the creepiness of the image for itself? Or is there a connection with the film’s “solution” to the mystery? If so, why can’t it be clearer?

 

 

Clarity is not to be had in the nearly one hour, though still informative “making of,” which comes in six parts, but has a play all function. Sadly, the principal emotion I came away with was that no one connected with the film really understood the attraction of the game or of video games in general.

The widescreen image (2.35:1, enhanced) is good, and the film comes with closed captioning, and DD 5.1. In addition to the making of, there are trailers for Ghost Rider, Casino Royale, Basic Instinct 2, The Benchwarmers, Underworld: Evolution, Ultraviolet, Hollow Man 2, Population 436, The Woods, The Boondocks, Quinceanera, and The Fog. Silent Hill hit the street on Tuesday August 22, for $28.95. There is also a full frame edition.

 

 

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