.com for Murder

I WANT MY LIFE BACK!!! I cannot believe that we just spent 90 minutes of my life watching that. OK, so the acting was all in all pretty atrocious, the plot was almost non-existent and the effects were terrible. I get what the director/writer was going for, something scary and futuristic. This movie was made around the time that the internet and particularly social networking were starting to become really really big business. Therefore this movie aims to play on peoples fears of the unknown, of the faceless people that you deal with everyday on the internet, and the fear that some of them are not altogether sane.

But this film was done in such an appalling way that not only did the whole story kind of fall flat, but for me it didn't even fill me with a sense or suspense or anxiety. I was bored by it. This film is listed on IMDb as a horror film, but unless you were a person of nervous disposition, in the house by yourself, during a thunder storm, without a duvet to hide under, could you actually consider this horrific in any way. And as a horror movie veteran, I was, I will say it again, BORED!

Anyone who has watched enough horror movies will know how this film will play out from the beginning to the end. There are no major shocks in it and quite frankly, it had the feel of a really REALLY low budget Indie film, without having the charm of actually being an Indie film.

Only watch this if you really really have nothing better to watch, or like us, just like to severely criticise bad horror films.

RATING: **

and boy did this movie test my resolve. This is a damn awful movie that is neither scary, creepy, or suspenseful. The dialogue is terrible and the acting is even worse. No one in this movie ever has the appropiate reaction to any situation. And the villian is just so bad he's not scary, he's laughable. You know you are in trouble when the best acting performance in your movie is by Huey Lewis. And is it just me or is it odd hearing Huey Lewis say the F* word. I guess it's not hip to be square anymore.

- halderic

(i imported this from the newsboard, since i think anyone ever looks over there)

This psychological thriller is something like "Rear Window of the cyber age". Nastassja Kinski is the beautiful Sondra Brummel who got stuck in a wheel chair due to some ski accident while her boyfriend Ben (rock singer Roger Daltrey) goes out of town. Misty Brummel (Nicolette Sheridan of "Knots Landing") comes over to help Sondra recover, and the two sisters spend some time together on the web, using Ben's password to sneak in some private chatroom. The Internet chitchats seem to be enjoyable until Sondra and Misty accidentally watch some suspicious guy threaten to rape and kill a girl (Kim Valentine). Not only they fail to convince an FBI agent (pop star Huey Lewis) into thwarting a virtual crime, they even put themselves in serious danger, because the psychotic killer (Jeffrey Dean) happens to be a vicious hacker who wastes no time tracking them down to their own residence...

Obviously scriptwriter and director Nico Mastorakis has done everything to make this movie an entertaining high-tech thriller. The website stripping scenes with porn star Julie Strain and "body double" Shelley Michelle are just appetizers to a lot of exciting and mysterious features that we can expect from (and should be watchful about) the Internet, and the digital visual effects and sounds do help make them more believable. As always, Nastassja Kinski gives a solid performance, while Nicolette Sheridan and the rest of the cast do their best as well (even Melinda Clarke is pretty cool in her minor role as FBI agent Williams). Although the DVD doesn't have any special features or commentaries, etc..., its widescreen and Dolby sound suffice to make ".com for Murder" a not-so-perfect but worth seeing movie. If you think such high-tech thrillers as "Hackers" or "StrangeLand" are good, you may like this one because it's somehow better.

To date, Nico Mastorakis's last non-documentary feature and a return to the horror genre, this time focusing on the perils of the internet. Its positioning in time is an odd one, making it partly forward-thinking in terms of certain dangers widely available internet might pose, while in terms of specific technologies (or just a lack of knowledge in the writers) make it a curio of that early era of message boards and "You've Got Mail." There was a bit of a cheap, low-rent visual style that I didn't exactly care for. And while things never quite got boiling the way they did in the Hitchcock films Mastorakis was clearly paying homage to, it was still interesting. I liked this better than the farces that came before it, even if it never really reached the heights of absurdity that characterized what I liked about his earliest work.

That is the question posed before you? This movie is a blatant rip off two movies, one good and one just as awful as this one. The one really good movie Copycat with Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter and other right down at the bottom of the scrap heap, Fear Dot Com with Stephen Dorff and Nastcha McElhone. If you're going to rip off a movie you have to do it in such a way that you'd find inconceivable to think about which movies that you are copying. To compare both this film and Fear Dot Com is very easy to do with the major exception that FDC was backed by a bigger studio and slightly bigger production values unlike this one which is definitely a low budget choppier. As side from that, you wonder as to why the once upon a star, Natasssja Kinski would be involved in this mess and that goes for both Huey Lewis and Nicolette Sheridan, who's gotten far far away from this junk without looking back at it. However, if you're in a mood for a late night insomniac time waster or just simply out of boredom (which is how i encountered this movie), here's the movie for you. Just have a copy of Fear Dot Com handy in case you feel the urge to compare notes and more cheap thrills.