It’s an immersive video game horror experience for the groups of friends in my latest weekend movie marathon. Two out of three flicks were fun, and I had a fave out of those two. Let’s find out which one.
KILLSTREAK (2025)
This 75-minute movie has a simple storyline, so if you love survival horror video game movies and the classic Stay Alive, just sit back and enjoy the cheap thrill ride.
It’s a familiar premise—online players discover a new video game and quickly learn that if you die in the game, you die in real life.
It begins with six players, each in their own room, immersing themselves in a survival horror game online. They are curious as to how the video game characters they are playing could possibly look and sound exactly like them, but naturally they totally explain away the red flag.
If you’re a horror gamer, you will feel the tension as you watch them exploring a creepy old video game house. Lone zombies roam the halls, and they don’t have much in the way of weapons while searching for keys to escape each level.
They have to run away as it becomes apparent that getting caught in the game causes a flickering version of the enemy to appear in your room to kill you in reality. Quit the game, and you also die. Eek!
It’s basic and straightforward, so just grab the popcorn and watch each character get caught and killed violently in their bedrooms by pixilated holograms. There are fun, in-game jump scares, some violent deaths scenes, and a devious little final battle.
LIVESCREAMERS (2023)
This sequel to Livescream is the total winner in this trio, and returning director Michelle Iannantuono probably had a bigger budget to work with, because this film is everything the first film failed to be.
Just like in Killstreak, there is a group of gamers live-streaming a survival horror video game. However, they are all playing locally in the same room on different monitors. The awesome aspect of this movie is that it flips the finger at the anti-woke crowd. These gamers are doing a livestream that celebrates diversity, so the selection of players is filled with people of color and queer people. Notably, a gay plot line plays a crucial part in the game they’re playing, securing this film a spot on the does the gay guy die? page.
There’s a reference to the events of the first movie, which the gamers believe is nothing more than an urban legend, and then they step into a video game mansion right out of Resident Evil.
They immediately notice the characters in the game look and sound just like them. Another red flag ignored…and this group already knows a story about a video game killing people! Sigh.
Soon after, they learn that if you die in the game, you die in real life. Well, one of them actually learns the hard way. In this case, it’s in the very same room as all the other players since they are playing locally. Now that’s a bloody good time.
The game cuts the livestream and informs them they must continue playing or die. While Killstreak seems to have borrowed a lot from this movie, it forgot to borrow blood, because this one has plenty of it.
On top of that, gamers who watch this film will relish the all-too familiar aspects of playing a survival horror game—finding weapons, using health kits, solving timed puzzles to survive, a relentless boss, and worst of all, quick time events. Fuck quick time events, even if I’m not the one actually playing the game.
The game even manages to mess with the players’ minds along the way, revealing their dirty secrets in order to turn them against each other so they won’t work cooperatively. This includes exposing cheating, disloyalty to their influencer team business, gay baiting, and more.
The arguing spills onto the screen, and you can’t help but wonder who would give a fuck about a partner influencer secretly starting their own separate channel when you’re in the middle of a game that can kill you.
The in-game atmosphere and tension are great, the kills are a blast, and the final decision the survivors have to make to survive is just like, well…something out of a video game. Awesome.
BACKLASH (2025)
This is a different take on the video game kills you in real life concept. In this one, a group of gamers ends up playing a live action version of a game at the location after which it was modeled.
Problem is that everything essential to the plot feels rushed and underdeveloped. We first see a teenage girl discovering a firework has been thrown through a window—a firework that explodes and blinds her.
Next, we meet her older sister’s group of friends. The older sister is tired of watching after her younger, blind sister, who gets bullied a bit at school.
Meanwhile, a nerd asks the sister’s friends if he can play video games with them. They don’t seem like major gamers, but apparently, they are. They finally agree to let the nerd join them for a round, but once they go online to play, they quickly kill his character and upload video of it online.
That’s it. That’s all the development we get concerning their love of video games and their “cyber bullying” of the nerd.
And yet they all wake up chained together at the real location off of which the game is based. They are wearing shock cuffs that zap them if they try to quit playing, and the idea is to fight it out with the enemies and find their way to the exit. Sadly, it wasn’t even a horror video game they were playing, which could have made this experience a lot more fun.
The fact that one friend is instantly psycho and willing to kill all his friends rather than work with them to survive just makes this whole movie feel absurd. And even though he’s the biggest douche in the bunch, most of the characters are not particularly likable.
There’s some suspense and action as the friends battle it out with guns and melee weapons while trying to escape the “game” and each other, but there’s nothing substantial to cling to. The possibilities of who could be orchestrating the game and the motivation behind it are limited, so in the end there’s no surprise.
