BlinkFlame

American Pie: Beta House is sort of in limbo between genres. On the one hand, it's a comedy with no plot and few genuinely clever jokes. On the other hand, it's porno that's a tad too soft-core to actually turn on any viewers. Essentially Beta House is a collage of sex scenes - some humiliating, others just lame attempts at humor - with a couple thin plot points thrown in an effort at cohesiveness. The characters are barely even two-dimensional, most development relies on knowledge of Naked Mile, and the "important" plot scenes are so far apart that you wonder why the writers even felt the need for a story.

In all fairness, I did not go into this movie without expectations. I liked the original three American Pie movies, and thought Band Camp and Naked Mile were solid rentals. I thought Naked Mile was almost good enough to be released in theaters, and so when I saw that some of the same characters were returning for Beta House, I was excited to see this installment. I was aware that there would be numerous scenes of debauchery and sexual humiliation in multiple forms. And I was fine with it, because in the past, these scenes were backed by the story and were well integrated into the plot. In Beta House, however, it's almost as if the writers forgot why the formula in the other AP movies worked. They spent too much energy working in the nudity that they forgot to actually write a story.

This movie is a disappointment and not even worth a one-dollar rental. The jokes are lame, the story is non-existent, and the porno-aspect is too tame if that's all you really care about seeing.

Let me be clear about one thing: This is not a good film. The narrative is sorely lacking in places, the dialogue is nothing special, and in some parts the acting is almost painful to watch. In too many cases the director attempts to cover up bad writing with disgusting and disturbing special effects - a sad trend in today's horror cinema. And speaking of horror, outside of those special effects, very little in this movie is actually scaring. There are no ominous moments, nothing to psychologically shake the viewer, and what few genuine scares the film does contain are all pretty much ruined by the all-too-obvious accompanying music cues.

That said, if you watch this as something other than a horror film, it can actually be fairly entertaining. This is more along the lines of something like Evil Dead 2, Planet Terror, or Army of Darkness - each of which has about the same amount of realism as The Hills Have Eyes. This movie features a mixture of comedy and action similar to the previously mentioned movies. The violence gets quite comical at parts, and the fight sequences are pretty well-coordinated. While THHE lack's the clever catchphrases that make Ash so popular, it does manage to maintain one's interest throughout the movie. In fact, if the creators had spent more time molding the movie into something like Army of Darkness, this would probably have turned out to be a much better film. Unfortunately, it suffers from attempts to keep it in the horror genre, and the makers do not have enough imagination to make that concept work here. As an action-thriller-comedy, however, it's worth a rental.

I would estimate that I've seen over a thousand movies in my lifetime. FeardotCom may very well be the worst of those films. The acting is bad, the dialogue is worse, and the editing is terrible. The film lacks coherence, cohesiveness, and, in some parts, comprehensiveness. The film manages to maintain its unwatchability for over an hour, but by that point the viewer will probably have already logged onto www.feardotcom.com in hopes of ending the misery. If I had been able to give this movie less than a star, I would have done so in a heartbeat. Do not make the mistake of renting this movie; there's a small chance it may scare you, but the odds of that happening are not worth sitting through 90 minutes of some of the worst examples of film-making.