Stay Alive

Stay Alive is a 2006 horror film directed by William Brent Bell, who cowrote it with Matthew Peterman. It was produced by McG, co-produced by Hollywood Pictures and released on March 24, 2006 in the US. In the U.S. the film was rated PG-13 for horror violence, disturbing images, language, and brief sexual and drug content. This is the first film in five years released by Hollywood Pictures.

A character in a video game called “Stay Alive” is spotted entering an eerie mansion. The character flees up the stairs and enters a room when, out of the darkness, a woman in a blood red dress lunges at the character. She knocks him off the staircase banister, and the character is killed when he is hanged by a chandelier chain. The player of the game, Loomis Crowley, quits playing and goes about a normal routine before he goes to bed. He is later awoken by a nightmare, and is killed in real-life by the woman in the red dress, in a manner similar to how his character died.

Elsewhere, Loomis’ friend, Hutch, receives a phone call informing him that Loomis is dead. At the funeral, Hutch is given all of Loomis' games by his sister, Emma, including Stay Alive. At the funeral, a blonde girl named Abigail introduces herself as a close friend to Loomis's roommate.

After the funeral, Hutch arrives at a coffee shop; which is owned and operated by his girlfriend, October, and her brother, Phineus. Hutch hands October the bag containing Loomis' possessions, and Phineus eventually finds Stay Alive, which they decide to play as a group that night.

That night October, Phineus, his friend Swink, and Abigail arrive at Hutch's house, with Hutch’s boss, Miller, playing at his office. To start the game, the players have to recite "The Prayer of Elizabeth" during the game’s intro. After a few hours of gaming, Miller’s character is suddenly killed after he is stabbed in the throat by the woman who killed Loomis. Moments later, Miller dies the same way as his character.

When Hutch returns to work, he is informed of Miller’s death after talking to two detectives, Thibodeaux and King. While this is happening, Phineus plays Stay Alive and just before he dies, he pauses the game. After doing some research, Hutch calls everyone together to reveal he knows how people are dying, when he notices Phineus' absence. They call him and learn he's on his way, when immediately after he is run down and killed by The Countess's horse-drawn carriage. Thibodeaux and King arrive on the scene, and King decides to play Stay Alive. King's character’s head is ripped in half, killing him. King is then killed in the same manner.

Hutch and Abby decide to go to Loomis's house, where they find the address of Stay Alive’s developer, Jonathan Malkus. They proceed to go to his mansion, and, assuming no one is home, they go in. There, they meet Jonathan, who tells them about how he based his game off The Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory.

Meanwhile, October learns that in order to kill The Countess, you must find her tower and trap her in her body, driving three nails in her heart, one in her throat, and another in her head. Swink then announces, after seeing a newscast, that King is dead, and that the group are suspects. They all flee, later meeting at Loomis’ house to formulate a plan.

October, who tries to confront the Countess on her own, is killed by her. Swink, Abigail and Hutch decide to investigate inside Malkus’ mansion. Swink decides to stay behind and play the game as both a distraction for The Countess, and an aid to the duo. Hutch and Abigail go inside the mansion, where they find various clues about The Countess, revealing that Malkus's house is actually the Bathory plantation. The group fights off The Countess several times, but Swink is seemingly killed by her after he is cornered and stabbed with a pair of rose cutters.

After a run in with The Countess’ black carriage, Hutch and Abigail locate Elizabeth’s alter. Suddenly, the door slams shut leaving Abby alone while Hutch panics and tries to open the door. She pleads with him to go ahead, as The Countess closes in on her.

When Hutch reaches the tower, he finds the Countess's body. He's able to get the nails in her body in the correct places, trapping her spirit in her body just before she kills Abigail. However, October earlier informed Hutch that the only way to truly get rid of The Countess is to burn her body. After she attacks him, Hutch manages to set The Countess on fire. Realizing the exit is locked, Hutch accepts the fact that he's going to be killed by ever-increasing fire, until Swink, who cheated the game like it cheated Phineus, and Abigail kick the door open and rescue him as Elizabeth’s body burns.

The movie ends in a video game store, showing that Stay Alive is now being officially released across the country. The last words are the incantation that resurrects The Countess.

As of June 29, 2006, the film opened at #3 in the U.S. box office, eclipsing its production budget with 11.7 million dollars that first weekend. It ultimately grossed a total of 23.08 million dollars in the United States. It was considered a box office success due to its production budget of only 9 million dollars. The movie has grossed a total of over 27.1 million dollars worldwide.

The theatrical version was given negative reviews by critics. Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 24 out of 100, based on 17 reviews.

In the Los Angeles Times, John Anderson commented that "'Stay Alive' spends a lot of time inside the video game system, and what will terrify the audience very early on is the realization that there's better acting in the video game than on the big screen." One reviewer from The Singapore Bell stated that Stay Alive converted him "to Satanism, as only this film can show that hell truly exists." Meanwhile, Variety magazine concluded: "Seldom is there anything close to real passion or panic on display here from cast members."

The DVD was released in the USA on September 19, 2006. It was made available in an unrated edition (100 minutes) and a PG-13 edition (85 minutes). The 15 minutes of new unrated footage include a new character and subplot. The unrated edition features more adult material.

Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting is a 1997 American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant. Alongside Ben Affleck and Robin Williams, the film starred Matt Damon in the lead role of Will Hunting, a prodigy hoodlum from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT. Written by Affleck and Damon, who rose to stardom with the film's success, Good Will Hunting was a box office hit and earned two Academy Awards.

Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is a janitor at MIT and has a genius-level intellect, eidetic memory and a profound gift for mathematics. Despite this, he remains working as a janitor and lives alone in a sparsely-furnished house in a rundown South Boston neighborhood, spending time with his friends Chuckie Sullivan (Ben Affleck) and Morgan O'Mally (Casey Affleck). An abused foster child, he subconsciously blames himself for his unhappy upbringing and turns this self-loathing into a form of self-sabotage in both his professional and emotional lives.

In the first week of class, Will solves a difficult graduate-level problem taken from algebraic graph theory that Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), a Fields Medalist and combinatorialist, leaves on a chalkboard as a challenge posed to his students, hoping someone might find the solution by the end of the semester. When it is solved quickly and anonymously, Lambeau posts a much more difficult problem—one that took him and his colleagues two years to prove. When Lambeau chances upon Will writing on the board, he chases him away, taking him for a vandal. However, Lambeau realizes Will wrote the correct answers and sets out to track him down.

Meanwhile, Will gets revenge on a bully named Carmine Scarpaglia, who, according to Will, used to beat him up years ago in kindergarten, and he now faces imprisonment after attacking a police officer who was responding to the attack. Realizing Will has enormous potential, Lambeau goes to Will's trial and intervenes on his behalf, offering him a choice: either go to jail, or be released under Lambeau's personal supervision to study mathematics and see a therapist. Will chooses the latter, even though he does not believe he needs therapy.

Will treats the first five therapists Lambeau has him see with utter contempt. In desperation, Lambeau finally calls on Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), his roommate at MIT, now an estranged old friend, who happened to grow up in the same neighborhood as Will. Sean differs from his predecessors in that he pushes back at Will and is eventually able to get past Will's hostile, sarcastic defense mechanisms. Will is particularly struck when Sean tells him how he gave up his ticket to see the Boston Red Sox in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series (thus missing Carlton Fisk's famous home run) in order to meet and spend time with a stranger in a bar, who would later become his wife. This encourages Will to try to establish a relationship with Skylar (Minnie Driver), a young English woman he had earlier met at a bar near Harvard University, where she is in her last year of study—and will soon graduate.

This doctor-patient relationship, however, is far from one-sided. Will challenges Sean to take a hard, objective look at his own life. Sean has been unable to deal with his beloved wife's premature death from cancer two years before.

Meanwhile, Lambeau pushes Will so hard that Will eventually refuses to go to the job interviews that Lambeau arranges for him. Will accidentally walks in while Lambeau and Sean are arguing furiously about the direction of his future.

Skylar asks Will to move to California with her, where she will begin medical school at Stanford. Will panics at the thought. When Skylar expresses sympathy about his past, it triggers a tantrum and Will storms out of the dorm. He shrugs off the work he has been doing for Lambeau as "a joke." Lambeau begs Will not to throw it all away, but Will walks out.

Sean points out that Will is so adept at anticipating future failure in his interpersonal relationships, that he either allows them to fizzle out or deliberately bails, so he can avoid the risk of emotional pain. When Will refuses to give an honest reply to Sean's query about what he wants to do with his life, Sean shows him the door. Will tells his best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck) that he wants to be a laborer for the rest of his life. Chuckie becomes brutally honest with Will; he is insulted that Will intends to waste his potential. He says to Will, "You don't owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. 'Cause tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I'll be fifty. And I'll still be doing this... [but] you're sittin' on a winning lottery ticket... `cause I'd do anything to have what you got... It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in twenty years. Hanging around here is a fuckin' waste of your time." He says that his greatest wish is to knock on Will's door one morning and find he isn't there.

Will goes to another therapy session, where he and Sean share that they were both victims of physical child abuse. Sean then gets Will to truthfully reply to him stating, "It's not your fault" over and over. At first Will responds to the comment saying "yeah, I know" but after repeating, Will begins to cry and Sean comforts him. Finally, after much self-reflection, Will decides to cease being a victim of his own inner demons and to take charge of his life. Soon after, Sean takes a sabbatical to travel the world and begins packing up his office when Lambeau visits. The two reconcile as friends and go out for a drink.

When his buddies present him with a rebuilt Chevrolet Nova for his 21st birthday, he decides to go after Skylar, setting aside his lucrative corporate and government job offers. Concurrent to the scene in which Will leaves, Chuckie knocks on Will's door, and gets no reply, much to his joy because earlier in the film, he had told Will that, if one day he knocked on his door and he wasn't there, it would mean that he had gone to do something with his life. Will leaves a brief note for Sean, using one of Sean's own quips, "If the professor calls about that job, just tell him, sorry, I had to go see about a girl."

He then drives off across a scenic American highway as the credits roll. The screen cuts to "The End", which was shown as the first scene of the film backwards.

Affleck and Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner's request, noted screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film's climax ought to be Will's decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar to California. Goldman has denied widely spread rumors that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.

Castle Rock bought the script for $675,000 against $775,000, meaning that Affleck and Damon would stand to earn an additional $100,000 if the film was produced and they retained sole writing credit. However, studios balked at the idea of Affleck and Damon in the lead roles, with many studio executives citing that they wanted Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. At the time Damon and Affleck were meeting at Castle Rock, director Kevin Smith was working with Affleck on Mallrats and with both Affleck and Damon on Chasing Amy. Seeing that Affleck and Damon were having trouble with Castle Rock, Smith and his producer partner Scott Mosier brought the script to Miramax, which eventually caused the two to receive co-executive producer credits for Hunting. The script was put into turnaround, and Miramax bought the rights from Castle Rock.

After buying the rights from Castle Rock, Miramax gave the green light to put the film into production. Several well-known filmmakers were originally considered to direct, including Mel Gibson, Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh. Originally Affleck asked Kevin Smith if he was interested in directing, Smith declined, saying they needed a "good director," stating he only directs things he writes and he is not much of a visual director. Affleck and Damon later chose Gus Van Sant for the job, whose work in previous films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had left a favorable impression on the fledgling screenwriters. Miramax was persuaded and hired Van Sant to direct the film.

Good Will Hunting was filmed on location in the Greater Boston area and Toronto over five months in 1996. Although the story is set in Boston, much of the film was shot at locations in Toronto, with the University of Toronto standing in for MIT and Harvard, and the classroom scenes being filmed at McLennan Physical Laboratories (of the University of Toronto) and Central Technical School. The interior bar scenes set in South Boston ("Southie") were shot on location at "Woody's L St. Tavern". The cast engaged in considerable improvisation in rehearsals; Robin Williams, Ben Affleck and Minnie Driver each made significant contributions to their characters. Robin Williams' last line in the film, as well as the therapy scene in which he talks about his character's wife's little idiosyncrasies, were both ad-libbed. The therapy scene took everyone by surprise. According to Damon's commentary in the DVD version of the movie, this caused "Johnny" (the cameraman) to laugh so hard that the camera's POV can actually be seen moving up and down slightly as it shows Damon breaking character by also laughing so hard.

Director Gus Van Sant says in the DVD commentary that, had he known just how successful the movie was going to be, he would have left at least a couple of edited scenes intact that were cut purely for considerations of length. One of these involves Skylar's visit to Chuckie in hopes of shedding light on some of Will's eccentricities that Will himself is unwilling to discuss.

The film is dedicated to the memory of poet Allen Ginsberg and writer William S. Burroughs, both of whom died in 1997.

The footage during the closing credits is along the Massachusetts Turnpike in Stockbridge, heading west toward the New York border. When the car passes under a bridge, the sign on it reads "Prospect St Stockbridge."

Good Will Hunting received many positive reviews from film critics: It has a 97% "Fresh" rating according to film review compilation website Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for many awards (see below).

According to the box office reports, Good Will Hunting grossed $225 million internationally (twenty-two times the film's budget). Although the film's limited release at the end of 1997 (traditional for likely Oscar candidates) merely hinted at its future success, the film caught on, thanks to good reviews and a strong reception by the American public. The film received international praise, in part due to the acting of Matt Damon, Robin Williams and Minnie Driver, all of whom were nominated for Academy Awards for the film, with Williams winning. Damon and Affleck won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

In the film's opening weekend in limited release, it earned $272,912. In its January 1998 wide release opening weekend, it earned $10,261,471. It went on to gross $138,433,435 domestically for a total worldwide gross of $225,900,000. The film had to compete at the box office with James Cameron's Titanic, which later went on to become the highest grossing film of all time (now surpassed by Avatar).

It has been contended that the film is based on the true story of Boston 'Southie' mathematics prodigy William Sidis who, in 1918, at age twenty, after completing work in mathematics and law at Harvard was hired on at the MIT physics labs by physicist Daniel Frost Comstock so "to keep the boy out of jail", as Comstock told Sidis' mother.

The film and its popularity was parodied by Affleck and Damon themselves in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

"Miss Misery" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic. Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" is also featured in the closing credits after "Miss Misery," but does not appear on the soundtrack.

While Danny Elfman's score was nominated for an Oscar, only two cues appear on the film's soundtrack release. Elfman's "Weepy Donuts" was used on NBC's The Today Show on September 11, 2006, while Matt Lauer spoke during the opening credits.

Langoliers

The Langoliers is one of four novellas published in the Stephen King book Four Past Midnight in 1990.

On a cross-country red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston, some passengers awaken to find that the crew and most of their fellow passengers have disappeared.

There is Brian Engle, an off-duty airline pilot. Dinah Bellman is a young blind girl with minor psychic powers. Fifth-grade teacher Laurel Stevenson takes to watching over Dinah. Nick Hopewell is from England. Don Gaffney, a retired tool-and-die engineer. There is Rudy Warwick, a businessman. Albert Kaussner is a talented Jewish teen violinist. A teenager with drug problems is called Bethany Simms. Rounding out the group is Bob Jenkins, a mystery author and Craig Toomy, an irritable investment banker on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. They realize only those sleeping are now left on the plane. Engle takes control and lands the plane in Bangor, Maine.

The airport is abandoned with no signs of life. There are no odors or electricity. Food and drinks are tasteless and fire simply sputters out. They soon hear 'radio static' in the distance. Craig believes it is 'Langoliers', monsters he had heard about as a child who go after those who waste time.

In trying to get to his appointments, Craig snaps and takes Bethany as a hostage. He shoots Albert, who escapes injury because the gun has no force. Craig is subdued and tied up. Bob theorizes that they have flown through a time rip caused by an aurora borealis that the airlines spotted over the Mojave Desert. Bob declares that the world they are in is the past, a world that doesn't allow time travelers to see past events, but a deserted world that "time" has left behind. To get back, Bob theorizes, they must fly back through the aurora.

The survivors work together to refuel the plane. Since it holds 'present time', it will burn properly, unlike the combustible materials in the bullet and matches.

Craig, now completely insane, escapes and rampages through the airport. He stabs Dinah in the chest and kills Don. He fears the others are manifestations of the Langoliers he heard of. Albert defeats Craig and leaves him on the airport floor.

While the plane is in its final preparations Dinah telepathically communicates with Craig and persuades him that his board meeting is being held on the runway. Craig makes his way out and hallucinates arriving at the meeting, but has a breakdown before his boss and screams that he deliberately cost the company millions, ensuring his eventual firing and disgrace.

It turns out Craig is right, in a way. Creatures emerge from the forest and head for the plane, consuming everything in their way. Craig is eaten.

In the plane, Bob determines that the Langoliers are the timekeepers of eternity, and that their purpose is to eat what is left of the past. The plane takes off, and as they fly the passengers see that the rest of the land falls apart, leaving a formless, black void. The survivors make their way back to Los Angeles and discuss their pasts as they fly; Nick reveals himself to be an assassin for the British Army who was going to Boston to find a politician funding the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and assassinate his girlfriend. Dinah speaks to Laurel about how her life is ending happily, and then succumbs to her injuries. Nick confesses his feelings for Laurel and the hopes of a romance with her. Albert and Bethany confess a similar attraction.

Bob realizes all must be asleep to survive going through the rift again. Nick volunteers to manipulate the controls though all know this will cost him his life. He takes a moment to ask Laurel to pass a message to his father, saying that he, Nick, has quit the business. The cabin pressure is decreased and all fall into a deep sleep. Nick vanishes as the plane goes through the rift.

Seemingly, nothing has happened. They land the plane in Los Angeles and the world first seems deserted. When they check outside, they hear a noise; this noise is not the ominous sound of the Langoliers, but a relaxing hum. Inside the airport, sounds echo and food has taste. Bob concludes that the time rift brought them into the future and that this world is not dead, but a world that's waiting to be born. The group moves themselves against the wall to avoid human traffic in the airport. They then see colors with holograms of people and activity going on. A flash hits them and they find themselves in the present again. Happy to be back, the group goes outside for some fresh air. But they freeze in mid-air in a quintessential 90's movie-ending.

The Langoliers was adapted for a two-part TV Movie in 1995. The TV movie starred Kate Maberly, Kimber Riddle, Patricia Wettig, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Frankie Faison, Baxter Harris, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, Christopher Collet and Bronson Pinchot.

The movie version of "The Langoliers", produced for broadcast on ABC-TV, was filmed almost entirely in and around the Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine (author King's hometown) during the summer of 1995. King himself made a cameo appearance in the film as Craig Toomey's boss, during Toomey's hallucination.

The partial main antagonist, Craig Toomy, was known to tear fragments of magazine, or whatever other paper-like material he could get his hands on, into small strips. Ben Hanscom happened to be doing this quite rapidly (with a napkin) at the first table discussion as Grownups in It (novel).

Carrie (1974) · 'Salem's Lot (1975) · The Shining (1977) · The Stand (1978) · The Dead Zone (1979) · Firestarter (1980) · Cujo (1981) · Christine (1983) · Pet Sematary (1983) · Cycle of the Werewolf (1983) · The Talisman (1984; with Peter Straub) · It (1986) · The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) · Misery (1987) · The Tommyknockers (1987) · The Dark Half (1989) · Needful Things (1991) · Gerald's Game (1992) · Dolores Claiborne (1992) · Insomnia (1994) · Rose Madder (1995) · The Green Mile (1996) · Desperation (1996) · Bag of Bones (1998) · The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) · Dreamcatcher (2001) · Black House (2001; with Peter Straub) · From a Buick 8 (2002) · The Colorado Kid (2005) · Cell (2006) · Lisey's Story (2006) · Duma Key (2008) · Under the Dome (2009) · Blockade Billy (2010) · Doctor Sleep (TBA)

The Gunslinger (1982) · The Drawing of the Three (1987) · The Waste Lands (1991) · Wizard and Glass (1997) · Wolves of the Calla (2003) · Song of Susannah (2004) · The Dark Tower (2004) · The Wind Through the Keyhole (TBA)

Rage (1977) · The Long Walk (1979) · Roadwork (1981) · The Running Man (1982) · Thinner (1984) · The Bachman Books (1985) · The Regulators (1996) · Blaze (2007)

Night Shift (1978) · Different Seasons (1982) · Skeleton Crew (1985) · Four Past Midnight (1990) · Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993) · Hearts in Atlantis (1999) · Everything's Eventual (2002) · Just After Sunset (2008) · Full Dark, No Stars (2010)

Danse Macabre (1981) · Nightmares in the Sky (1988) · On Writing (2000) · Secret Windows (2000) · Faithful (2004; with Stewart O'Nan)

Riding the Bullet (2000) · The Plant (2000; unfinished) · Ur (2009)

Creepshow (1982) · Cat's Eye (1985) · Silver Bullet (1985) · Maximum Overdrive (1986; also director) · Pet Sematary (1989) · Sleepwalkers (1992) · Cell (TBA)

Sorry, Right Number (1988) · Golden Years (1991) · The Stand (1994) · The Shining (1997) · Chinga (1998; with Chris Carter) · Storm of the Century (1999) · Rose Red (2002) · Kingdom Hospital (2004) · Desperation (2006)

Ghosts (1997; with Michael Jackson) · Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2010; with John Mellencamp) · Black Ribbons (2010; with Shooter Jennings)

Creepshow (1982) · The Dark Tower (2007) · The Stand (2008) · The Talisman (2009) · American Vampire (2010) · N. (2010)

The Aftermath (1963) · Sword in the Darkness (1970) · The House on Value Street (1974) · The Cannibals (1983; 1989)

Unpublished works by Stephen King · Media based on Stephen King works · Stephen King in popular culture · Tabitha King · Naomi King · Joe Hill · Owen King · Bryan Smith · Peter Straub · Rock Bottom Remainders · Dollar Baby · Jerusalem's Lot · Castle Rock, Maine · Derry, Maine · The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red.