Stay Alive

Stay Alive has nothing to do with the Bee Gees, but is a horror with something to do with playing avideo game which is about some dead bird out to kill people, but if you die in the game, you die... for real! Hilarious fun, I'm sure. The only tiny reason you might want to see it is for Frankie Muniz who was, amazingly, 20 at the time the movie was made. How come in Malcolm in the Middle he always looks about 14? Anyway, onto the music which is by John Frizzell who seemed to have a promising career after a few fairly high profile movies - most notably Dante's Peak and Alien: Resurrection - but like some of his contemporaries seems stuck in the horror rut, save for a few indie movies.
Whatever you take from this review, my strongest piece of advice is that you subscribe to the Film Score Monthly Podcast. They are a touch erratic in their production timetable, but of all the film music Podcasts, they are leagues ahead in terms of opinions, together with some fascinating nuggets of information. At time of writing, their most recent is dedicated to horror scores (for Hallowe'en), but has a brief and absolutely hilarious passage on how to write a contemporary horror score. Effectively, they sample the various orchestral stingers that current horror composers use and then simply 'play' them on a keyboard. The sad thing is, the results are no worse than most of what comes out of Hollywood these days. Having said that, John Frizzell does manage to come up with something a little more accomplished, but in plenty of tracks you can hear various orchestral stings play out one after the other and it's hard to argue that a sample of each one tracked at the appropriate place would be more or less worthy as underscore.

Fortunately, where the horror abates, Frizzell can actually compose something more meaningful. While the piano is hardly the most inspired choice for quieter moments, having it detuned (not quite honky tonk) is and gives the material a spooky poignancy. Some gentle cello writing added to the mix for Butch's Story also adds a little more depth to the score. I'm in two minds about Stay Alive. The opening isn't promising, then it gets better, then it ventures back to hum drum horror, then it reverts to the more stylish writing for the quieter passages. It certainly lacks the grand guignol of Alien: Resurrection, but one can't help but wish that it was just a score for a more restrained, supernatural chiller, than a slasher as the results would be far superior. Not without its moments, but hard to fully recommend.