Stay Alive is the perfect movie for a midnight screening, because the only way it can be fully enjoyed is if you're free to openly make fun of it, and you have an appreciative audience for your verbal pot-shots. Adam and I took it in with about a dozen kids and I must say, even though I'm supposed to be the funny one, when it comes to making hilarious wisecracks during a silly horror flick, Adam Mast takes a back seat to no one. With his arsenal of movie quotes and a gunslingers instinct for timing, I'm no match for the Mast-er.

First of all I'm the worst possible audience for a film based on a video game. When I was starting High School, Pong started popping up in our hang-outs and was universally derided by a generation who'd grown up with skills honed by pinball and fooseball. That was where a real man slipped his quarters - Pong was regarded as a boring little fad. This is where I admit that we all very shortsighted and stupid. By the time Pac-man came along I was too old to catch the fever, I was much more focused on college girls (a diversion that will most likely never lose it's popularity) but some of these video games are giving indiscriminate sex a run for it's money.

When I tell people that I've never spent more than a total of about a half hour of my life playing any kind of video game, they shake their heads as though it's something I should be pitied for, like I'm mildly retarded or was born partially deaf. I've watched other people play a few of these games and am duly impressed by their skills as well as the amazing technology that they display. Let's just say Pong never gave me nightmares, and so a film like Stay Alive is as alien to me as Fellini to a toddler.

Not that I didn't find Stay Alive oddly entertaining (Adam joked both that they should have called it "Stay Awake," and summed up his many remarks by announcing the film to be gayer than Brokeback Mountain.) Still when the time came when I needed to run to the restroom, I hurried back and even got a little freaked out when the toilet flushed itself. I was surprised to see a few recognizable stars in the film, both Adam Goldberg and Frankie Muniz were on board for this cgi haunt and one of them even lives to tell the tale. Adam kept us up on where the film was borrowing from - but I wasn't bothered by it's derivative plot structure, because I hadn't seen any of the films he called off. I will say that most of the creepy phantasms were variations on a theme from The Ring and The Grudge (pallid corpse-like creepy-walking girls) who were only scary when the film thrust them at you unexpectedly along with the expected musical crescendo.

The films many characters were offed in grisly fashion but it's makers shied away from any gory money shots, only doling out a few of the less messy after effects. This and the lack of gratuitous nudity were ultimately disappointing for a movie of this ilk. (PG-13) what a buzzkill! The story revolves around a video game that sucks you in as a character in it's macabre paradigm and if you are offed in the game, you would suffer the same nasty demise in real life. But the easy solution of simply not playing the game anymore proved fruitless as the game would play itself sans gamers and there seems to be no escape - ala Final Destination. As we come to find out the game is based on actual events surrounding a mad southern plantation Baroness with a penchant for capturing hapless victims (mostly young girls whom she despised due to their youth) and chaining them up in a gothic torture chamber and letting a nasty pair of sewing sheers and gravity take care of the blood-letting.

Evidently these events took place before the American judicial system - as we know it - had really gelled, because when they caught the woman and judged her guilty of her many gruesome deeds, instead of bringing her to trial they simply locked her away in a tower on her plantation to die of deprivation. Oh but as they chained the tower up she vowed to return one day and so on and so forth. Once their friends start dropping like flies, leads Jon Foster, Samaire Armstrong and Muniz discover the location of the titular game's developers and darned if when they arrived at the address, it wasn't the self same plantation fabled in story and song. The film offers some fun characters who spout laughable dialogue "Whoa she's got serious body karate," states Phin (Jimmi Simpson) a sort of new age James Spader. But it's the kind of bad that has camp value and makes you roll your eyes not in total dismay but in a sort of bemused enjoyment.

Stay Alive is chuck full of corny stuff, but it has more of a popcorny feel that more or less gives an audience it's money's worth. The younger members of the crowd were quite into it - gamers themselves, no doubt. It all comes to a fairly predictable climax in the tower of doom - where the witch reincarnate could only be summarily dispatched according to the rules of witchcraft - a nail here a nail there and then she must be sparked up. As the living members of the cast retreat from their grisly chore, they show the smoke coming from the tower in the background which had to have been someone's idea of an allusion to 911 - though the idea of a parallel (cyber-phantasmic terrorists) is more than a reach.

The film will not be judged Fresh in the great tomatometer of the nation's critics, but to be fair I half-way enjoyed myself - mainly because this is the type of film I invariably skip and thus it had a certain novel charm for this reporter.