A circle of friends stumbles upon an obscure video game in their murdered friend’s collection. Intrigued, they “jack in,” “load up” and otherwise commence playing this online co-op Resident Evil/Silent Hill clone.

But at some point one of the friends’ avatars doesn’t survive the horror, and he jacks out or loads down or whatever and calls it a night.

Later, the guy with no skillz is found dead, and—OMG—he was killed in exactly the same way his character died in the game.

The rest of the crew quickly deduce what’s going on, but they’re somehow addicted to the game (the voice-over said they couldn’t stop playing; I made a logical leap), and now they must use all their wits, resources and weapon upgrades to … stay alive.

Video games are the hot young adult phenomenon these days, so a movie like Stay Alive was inevitable, really. I imagine a similar film in which chicks in tapered-leg jeans and dudes with emo haircuts are dismembered because they downloaded the same song off Limewire is in post-production. It’s a winning formula: what the kids like + death + maybe some boobs = at least $800 at the box office.

Stay Alive stars (among others) Frankie Muniz and Adam Goldberg, opens March 24 and will suck.