FearDotCom (2002)

A serial killer known as The Doctor (Stephen Rea) is streaming his gruesome handiwork live over the internet for the entertainment of twisted individuals. Meanwhile, the spirit of one of The Doctor's previous victims has set up her own online torture portal (don't ask me how), punishing those who are tempted to watch by killing them 48 hours later. New York cop Mike (Stephen Dorff) is on the case, aided by Department of Health worker Terry (Natascha McElhone).Director William Malone gave us the entertaining 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill, but his follow-up, Feardotcom, is far less satisfying: the plot is wholly unoriginal (it's basically The Ring, with a website instead of a video, plus a bit of torture porn), the convoluted script is a mess, the performances are weak, and the whole affair is given an aesthetic guaranteed to get my goat-trite blue and orange palette, rapid editing, and lots of dark imagery with flickering lighting (just like 90% of horror films from the same decade).In the film's most ridiculous scenes, both Mike and Terry visit feardotcom.com (why the double .com? See IMDb's trivia for the lame reason) despite being well aware of what will happen to them in two days' time. That's dedication beyond the call of duty, but also pretty damned stupid. As is this film.

True. It has flaws beyond bad or anything known as bad within this dimension within time and space we live in. But you know what? For a film as bad as Alone In The Dark (AITD movie has a 1% on Rotten Tomatoes), it probably comes nowhere as near or even close. True, this movie is very bad and literally has a mixture of too much plot with absolutely no plot at all, has literally either too many clichés or beyond too many for that matter, the acting,writing, and screenplay is sometimes very,very,very poor for a movie that made on a "very unquestionable budget of $40M-42M dollars", and yes, in itself, this is a horror movie, like The Fog remake, that has really questionable quality, and that this movie is a rip-off of Se7en, The Ring (both the original Japanese 1998 movie and it's American remake which came out the year this one came out), Kairo, Videodrome, and last but not least, the 1998 movie Strangeland. But do you want to know something? For a movie that seems to have 0% genius, this movie is as if it were made by someone who was just maybe, just maybe a genius, during the silent era, or at least the German Expressionist era. I guess this movie does seem to at least have some genius. 4.0 would probably be a better rating for this on this site.

With a whopping 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5 mil. opening weekend, that says a lot about Feardotcom. With such eerie promotion coupled with a unique premise, one can only wonder why audiences did not visit the site.Feardotcom revolves around the death of a man involved in an alleged unsolved murder. The man appeared to have seen something before he met his demise. What did he see? How did this projection get there? Detective Mike and scientist Terry team up to find the murderer or shall we say "host", but in order to do so they must embark on a website that kills its viewers within 48 hours.With that plot, you would think it would be easy for screenwriter Moshe Diamant to make sense of the film. Unfortunately, that is not the case. A recurring white ball bounces back and forth and left to right with no reason. An inaudible voice is uttered from a house phone with no thought as to whose voice it belongs to. Not even the website makes sense. From the first shot to the last, it is blatant that more thought was given to the production than the script (and oh how stellar some of the hallucinatory sequences look on cellulite). Aside from a nonsensical script, the dialogue is so on the nose you would fancy why Mike or Terry never had the urge to scratch theirs. Although, the film starts off interestingly enough. The title montage is quite ominous and effectively done. Not to mention the opening scene. The train station is so deathly quiet you could almost hear cells dividing. By the time the passenger meets their fate, you cannot help but keep watching even though you know the impact beforehand. However, it would help if the film was as strong as the opening. What I will say is that Feardotcom is consistent with its suspense. There is never a scene that is terse or abrupt in creating atmosphere. Not a single room is well-lit and each minute you go down it, you feel the terror of every second. Honestly, I feel if the film were a short movie, my rating would be higher. When the characters do not speak, we have a winner. When the brightness is lowered and the apparitions take center, you cannot help but look. Unfortunately, the film has this exposition that is just pompous and unnecessary. We want to see more of the website- not see the maker of the site, and then hear the antagonist's spoon-fed motive. In brief, Feardotcom does not deserve the 3% on Rotten Tomatoes. Technically, the film is superb. It has a nice blue hue and the rain looks pretty. I cannot say the same about the script though, which is why some of the negative feedback is deserved. If you choose to visit Feardotcom (not like the rest of the United States), you will be treated to some creepy and fascinating imagery. But if you choose not to visit the site, you would have probably made the right choice.

(This review probably doesn't contain any spoilers worth mentioning, though.)Well, let's see what we've got here...Take a few plot elements stolen from The Ring/Ringu, an incomprehensible story of a little girl who died due to some sort of medical condition or malpractice and now lives inside the wires of the internet looking to exact revenge on the doctor who now happens to run a website where you can watch people get killed (or was it the site that kills, or both?), a hint of fetish porn, a load of I-took-too-many-psychedelic-drugs special effects (well, "effects" is a big word, they're more like lots of flashes, shifting and blurring combined with a bunch of noise), a cop and a doctor trying to find out what in the world is going on, put them all in a blender, mix them up for a couple of minutes, and you've got something that resembles this movie.Did that make sense to you? No? Not surprising, given the fact that the plot of this movie is rather incomprehensible and flies off in every direction, a fact which the creators further try to obscure by means of the effects I mentioned earlier. I even have to wonder whether I explained this right, as the events are often rather disjointed. I added a spoiler flag for good measure to go with my attempt to explain a few of the plot twists, but I don't think it really matters. I kept wondering whether there was any way that the story could redeem itself, a bit like a train wreck from which you can't look away. In that sense this movie proves its own point somewhat, if there was any, and I suppose that will remain its only merit. However, by the time your reach the scene that is supposed to be the big showdown, where our hero saves the day by performing yet another nonsensical act, you've given up trying to explain all of this and just go "Yeah, whatever..."I suggest that if you do attempt to sit through this one, you find something else to do in the meantime, like a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku, because here's one movie that definitely does not deserve your undivided attention.