stay awake

holy toast. i'm not well, and like all unwell people i'm lying around on the sofa under a blanket, griping and moaning and watching dvds. until this afternoon when i watched a horror film so bland and shockless i found myself doing all of the following things during it;
~watered the plants.
~watched a carrier bag flutter on the railings outside my house for ten solid minutes.
~read the payment instructions on the back of the gas bill.
a few years ago, when i lived in a flat known as greyskull, tina and i made the fundamental mistake of renting a dvd based purely on it's cover. i thought nothing could match the insult on my intelligence that was th13teen ghosts but somehow stay alive managed to simultaneously insult my intelligence and waggle it's tongue in my face.
a third of the way through the film i was practically screaming at the telly - 'how did this get green lighted ? how ?' what was the pitch for god's sake ?
"yeah, it's like, a cross between resident evil, hollyoaks and like, final destination, the trilogy, yeah ?"
actually, that at least makes it sound interesting. what it was, as far as i could tell though i did have a fever, was a gcse drama with high production values.
the gang's all here - gawky teen, goth girl called october, kooky chick, snoopy, charlie brown and linus, all struggling under the weight of the towering cliches hurtling form their purty lil mouths. adam buxton once wrote a very funny guide to dialogue (as director ken korda) and i swear, it was as though the hormonal scriptwriters had lifted it straight from him;
"something bad's happening. something really, really bad"
"what the HELL is going on here ?"
"we're in the bitch's back yard, man"
"he was run over by a horse drawn carriage!" (honestly, i am not making this up)

now i love computer games. and i love horror films, even shit ones. but the two should never merge because the terrifying, mewling afterbirth it creates is so god-awful i found myself pleading aloud for even the most likeable character to hurry up and die. the point of the film is that they start playing a game, which releases an evil spirit, which then starts killing them off in the game, and then in real life exactly as they did in the game, except they stop playing, but then the killing continues and...you get the picture. at this rate i can look forward to being eaten by zombies, killed by a pig-masked maniac with a chain saw or tumbling off a cloud if stay alive knows something we don't.
...what really made my tongue unroll in awe was that at the end of the film (i'm not ruining the ending for you, the film ruins the ending for you by existing in the first place) the killer computer game hits the shelves of department stores all over america, so next time...it could be you (provided you part with the forty quid to buy the game in the first place). the marketing executives must have been fisting each other with cheques at the thought of this franchise tsunami - watch the film, buy the game - what's that noise ? why, it's bill hicks spinning in his grave.
words alone cannot describe the body-popping, traffic-stopping awfulness of this film. watching it can. i now have a copy of this film, given to me by a - now i think about it - relieved looking and smirking friend. you can have it. anyone. anyone at all. give me your address, i'll pay the postage.