FeardotCom (2002)

Director: William Malone

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone

Run Time: 101 mins

Certificate: 18

 

Plot Outline: A detective and a health inspector team up to solve a spate of mysterious deaths where victims start bleeding from the eyes and die within 48 hours. They think it's some disease spreading but it turns out that each victim logged onto a snuff torture site, feardotcom.com, run by sadistic killer "The Doctor" who tortures his victims before killing them live over the internet. The web site is haunted by the spirit of a former victim of the Doctor who in turns is killing users logging in to watch the man in action.

The Review: What a complete turkey of a horror flick, FeardotCom has SOOOO much going on it's almost impossible to piece it all together. In his first directorial outing since the reasonably entertaining The House on Haunted Hill remake, William Malone goes completely off-the-rails and throws everything but the kitchen sink in front of the camera to try and patch together a film. The main problem is that the film has little focus on what the main plot of the film is. There was no need to have two main plot themes regarding the web site running through the film. The first being the killer broadcasting out his victims' death live. That I can live with and the film would have been better pursuing that avenue on it's own and turning it into a more standard thriller. But we also get the plot about people logging onto the site and their worst fears being realised and killing them by the spirit of the little girl. Did anyone involved see The Ring by any chance? There's ghosts, vengeful spirits and a whole load of weird imagery thrown in for good measure. The two plots run side-by-side for most of the film, eventually coming together in the finale in a stupendous mess which does it's best to explain what has happened. The mix of supernatural and realistic explanations for what is going on really confuse each other and leave so many questions unanswered. Malone's attempts to create some sort of atmosphere are bland and tiresome - the chronic lack of light in New York, rain-lashed streets and sewers dripping with water and slime. It looks extremely bleak and depressing but there's little substance underneath all of the gloom. Malone throws in some of his quickly-edited and strobed montages of disturbing imagery too but they don't work half as well as they did in his first film. Even the cast seems disjointed and distant from each other. Stephen Dorff looks like he'd rather be elsewhere and Natascha McElhone looks like she is somewhere else. Hell, Jeffrey Combs even has a small role in this but it's just such a pointless waste he might as well not bothered. There's very little gore on show either. You'd expect a torture web site to have just a trace of the red stuff somewhere, surely? And there's also the ludicrous web site address of feardotcom.com to chuckle at as well. Why it isn't called fear.com in the film is beyond me.

Final Verdict: FeardotCom is one of the messiest films I think I've ever seen. There's so much going on and so little effort and time put into ironing out the gaping problems in every department. There's just a general attitude of "CBA syndrome" (can't be arsed) which runs from the director to the actors to the script writers. A shoddy mess of biblical proportions. The web site in the film states "Do you like to watch?" when users log in. That answer is a resounding HELL NO!