It’s a horror plot so surefire that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before: Young people play a mysterious new videogame and start to die, isa - isa, in grisly scenes mimicking their game deaths. Stay Alive runs through this plot with such a plodding lack of imagination that you think again: Parang napanood ko na ito ah, on The X-Files or a direct-to-video picture you missed. Surely a movie this tired can’t be the first crack at a fundamentally decent genre idea?

Stay Alive gets around this conundrum easily by knocking off The Ring and throwing in a little of the Final Destination series: the former’s ghostly gimmick mixed with the latter’s view of life as an elaborate series of macabre booby traps. Unfortunately, even the cut-and-paste is botched; no Ring-style tension builds, and the PG-13 rating curtails the death scenes, most of which all but cut away before the character’s gory fate is sealed. Yes, you read that right: Stay Alive is like a Final Destination movie without the death scenes.

Although kung hanap mo lang ay kakatakutan, eh nood kana.

Tubig!