Terreur point com

At time of writing Feardotcom is down as the 53rd worst rated movie on IMDB and I truly don't understand why. Let's make something perfectly clear, this is a bad movie but it's in no way bad to that degree.

Starring Stephen "Blade" Dorff, Natascha "Truman Show" McElhone, industry veteran Stephen Rea, one of my all time favorite actors Jeffrey Combs and the token cameo appearance by Udo Kier it certainly does have a decent roster.

It tells the story of a website which when visited gives you 48hrs before you go insane and die. Basically it's Ringu/The Ring (1998) just with tweaks. Sadly those tweaks aren't very good and the movie has come out as a bit of a confused mess.

I get what they were trying to do and disagree with other reviewers that the film didn't make sense, it really did. It just wasn't very good and it felt like such a great cast were thoroughly wasted on this, especially considering it's a blatant ripoff of The Ring which had its US remake the very same year this came out.

Bad film? Absolutely. One of the worst? Hardly.

The Good:

Natascha McElhone and Jeffrey Combs

The Bad:

Stephen Rea and Jeffrey Combs feel wasted

Plot falls apart

Takes a lot from other films

About halfway through the movie, I was actually considering giving this a 4, but the complete and utter lack of reasoning in this movie that made me give it a 1 I will now try to sum up.

The ghost made a website that people can log (and start hallucinating from) onto only 48 hours later they will be dead unless they find her body so she can exact revenge on someone who killed her on another website that people subscribe to, even though she kills other people in car crashes and train accidents who had no involvement with her death.

Things I learned from FearDotCom:

-Ghosts are capable of creating websites.

-The internet is inherently evil.

-People who use the internet are freaks.

-People who use the internet are incapable of closing their eyes.

-A bunch of weird images on a computer can drive someone crazy and make them hallucinate.

-A bunch of weird images on a movie can drive someone so crazy that they hallucinate so they think what they are watching makes one ounce of logical sense.

Obviously the producers of this movie wanted the audience to be driven insane by the film and have shut off our brains by the time the "ending" has arrived. Sadly, I was still conscious at the end which didn't explain anything and only dropped my score from a 4 to a 1.

And it's a very boring movie too. Did I mention this movie sucks?

I was interested to see if time had been kind to this film, or if the original loathing I felt during the release still held. Well the answer, it's worse then I remember, time has of course been unkind, so it now looks dated, but worse, it's an incoherent mess, that makes absolutely no sense. I will give some credit to Natasha McElhone, who does at least try and give a sincere performance, but she was up against it in this dire film.

At the time the production values were pretty good, so I won't slate it for ageing, but I will slam it for being a terrible film, that makes no sense at all, it never decides whether it wants to be a thriller or a supernatural horror.

Avoid. 2/10

If the survival of horror films depends on titles such as this "FearDotCom", we are indeed facing the downfall of the genre. This is lame, uninspired and repetitive garbage that irritates you from start to finish. Director William Malone's idea of suspense exists out of underexposed and fuzzy images of murders edited together in boisterous flashes that actually show you NOTHING. Add a poorly written script about a murderous website and completely unconvincing characters to this and you've got yourself one of the biggest cinema-turkeys since the new millennium. If the premise of this film rings a bell, it means that you recognize it from the Japanese cult hit "Ringu"…. Or the slightly inferior American remake "the Ring". Only, the videotape has been replaced by an internet website and the poor victims have only 2 days left to live after being exposed instead of 7. Typical for an unscrupulous rip-off…Faster, louder and modernized! The elaboration is a mess: weak dialogue, plot holes all over the place, no style or atmosphere and very bad acting. I can't believe class actors like Udo Kier and Stephen Rea were talked into accepting roles like this? Surely they can still do better even though they both have seen their best times. Stephen Dorff and the leading lady deliver lousy performances in roles that really don't fit them. Dorff as a tough, experienced copper? Doubtful… Perhaps what annoyed me most about the cast (shallow, I admit) is seeing how one of my all-time favorite B-actors, Jeffrey Combs, is given such a small and insignificant role! That's Doctor Herbert West from Re-Animator we're talking about, dammit! Show a little more respect, Malone! If you love horror, you should avoid "FearDotCom" at all costs! It's bad for your nerve system.

Every so often a film will come along that requires a fair deal of sacrifice. You have to sacrifice your personal code of what you come to call of perfection and you must view the world through your eyes and not your mind. Feardotcom is one of those films. In a grey world, with a blue atmosphere and a black existence, lies a man, bleeding from the eyes from some sort of hemerage, dead, because of his plagued visions of a little blonde girl with a white ball. The case is brought forward to a detective who fears germs and disease and one who works with them at the Department of Health. As they search for the answers of why so many people are being found dead, bleeding from the eyes they stumble upon a website entitled feardotcom.com. As more research is made available they are able to link the death of the victim to occurring exactly forty-eight hours after logging on to the site. Then comes the obligatory promise to not visit that site at any cost but instantly break it as soon as the others back is turned. There are three functioning parties within the parameters of this film. There are the good guys. The bad guy, a medical reject that is known only as The Doctor. This is a man who believes that death is an art and therefore should be as graphic as possible. He tortures his victims until they beg to die and then he kills them, making him an artist instead of a murderer. The last formation in this morbid puzzle is a blonde dominatrix, a pale little girl with a white ball and a rotting corpse at the bottom of a flooded reservoir. She is a neutron force that keeps the cell process moving in a forward fashion. She is neither good nor evil. She kills but does so in hopes of redemption. A person searching for something but hasn't found the right key to unlock her treasure chest of ghastly bliss. The problem here is that neither the Doctor nor does the ghost have any connecting factors. First the cops search for the Doctor, then they becomes side tracked by the site that is killing people and search for the ghost and forget about the Doctor, until they finally set the ghost aside and go back to searching for the doctor. This film is an incoherent mess that possesses no bonding materials to make its story move at one pace and stick to one thing at a time. It is like a huge black whole where things come out of and get sucked back in as they feel. Scenes end short with no others to vouch for them. People are found dead and forgotten about and detectives find things without having to search for them, only to have nothing in which to apply them to in the future. But we must take into consideration that this is one of the best boring films I have ever seen. It's a film that makes promises to its viewer and then breaks them because it can. It is more of an experience than a film itself. It is a group of scenes that would make David Lynch bow his head in honours but would never be dumb enough to form a movie around. It is a cyber kinetic game that plays with its viewer's emotions. Why do you look at car crashes even though you know you don't want to see what could have happened to the victim? It is because people want to see something that they shouldn't. It's a voyeuristic tendency that people have that could push oneself to the edge of decency and still leave the person hungry for more. This is a film that wants to feed our fetishes with the obscene by being as sick and twisted as possible. We are shown skinned human carcasses, blood spewing reptile like women and live surgery, all broadcast on the Internet. The human body is a network of gears and leavers that read codes that enable life, so why can't computers do the same thing? The Internet is a body of work that previews the future by utilizing the past. Yet this is not a smart film, it ditches the idea of having something to say within the first half an hour. It has no moral code and follows no ingenious rules, it goes wherever it wants, whenever it wants and has no problem in knowing that it is absolutely terrible. You could probably get the same effect of this film from lining up four televisions in a row and playing Seven, Dee Snider's Strangeland, the Cell and House on Haunted Hill all at once. It is one huge mash of colours and feeling that the eyes will love but the brain will loathe. The film was directed by William Malone who knows how to make terrible horror films (House on Haunted Hill) that are like nice, big, juicy, red apples. They look delicious until you bite into it and get a mouthful of a nice plump worm. This is one of the most visually stunning films of the year and one of the most inconsistent all at the same time. This is a film that has so much going for it that that its priorities get lost in the cause and become little of the effect. But although this is a truly brilliant film, it is nothing more than a W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. (what your see is what you get). It suffers in trying to compare but results in little contrast. The visuals have really nothing to do with anything that happens in this film. It's not some deep, emotional burden that uses symbolic structures and astounding breakdowns to amplify the viewer's attention span and make them think. This is a run-of-the-mill detective thriller with a ghost story twist. It has no symbolic substance meaning that if you really wish to see how miraculous this film is you have to watch this film in such a fashion that you will be able to absorb the films good qualities, on mute. William Malone, a man whose fascination with fear allows him to produce the product but rarely radiate it, directed the film. I think it would suit Malone wonderfully to consider becoming a conceptual artist of take up the art of silence film. The film also sees Malone in one of the years most ironic pairing in actor Stephen Dorff (neither seems to read scripts before signing on to films). Dorff is the films greatest asset in that he is the most talented man on screen and he does the best he can to make this film seem like a real detective film. As for Stephen Rea as the Doctor, he falls flat on his face. Rea is one of the most boring and unthreatening villains I have ever seen, clearly this guy called in a favour to get this role. Since this film was released I have seen nothing but negative comments for it, which, in all entirety, it deserves. But in all honesty there is more good about this film than people are willing to realize because they are bogged down by the incepted story and not willing to care about anything else. But for the most part, in the genre of bad films, this one is just about the best.