Game Over

Reviewed - Stay Alive: You'd think there were enough useless movies based on real video games without film-makers dreaming up imaginary digital rubbish around which to structure new, more senseless idiocies. It seems not.

Stay Alive, which manages the not unimpressive feat of being worse than Sylvester Stallone's Staying Alive, follows a gang of teenage cretins as they have unhappy interactions with a PC game set in a haunted house. Before long, it becomes apparent that a secret rule, one not contained in the game's booklet, is being enforced by some long-dead entity: if you die on the screen, you die in real life.

Actually, it's not a bad scenario for a horror film and one scene, in which a player glances from a torture on his laptop towards a similar event in the real world, demonstrates the concept's potential for generating unsettling imagery.

Sadly, the folk involved in putting together Stay Alive do not, on this evidence, have the requisite talent even to make trash out of trash. The dialogue is ram-your-fist-in-your-mouth bad. The editing appears to have been carried out with a broadsword. And the acting? Well, suffice to say that Frankie Muniz - now 20 but still microscopic - is as good as anybody else in the picture. And he's unforgivably awful.

The gamers' smug and dangerously misguided confidence in their own coolness will, within minutes of the opening credits, cause even the most mild mannered of viewers to pray for the posse's grisly annihilation. Fortunately, such prayers are, for the most part, satisfactorily answered.