‘Want to see a really killer website?’
Fear Dot Com is a 2002 horror film about mysterious deaths which occur 48 hours after users log onto the titular website. Stylized as feardotcom
Directed by William Malone (Parasomnia; House on Haunted Hill; Creature; Scared to Death) from a screenplay written by Josephine Coyle, based on a storyline by Moshe Diamant, with contributions by Holly Payberg-Torroija. It was an international co-production with funding from Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, the UK and the USA.
The soundtrack score was composed by Nicholas Pike (It’s Alive, 2009; Parasomnia; Love Object; Sleepwalkers; Critters 2).
Plot:
Four bodies are found in New York City. The coincidence? They all died 48 hours after logging on to a site named fear.com. Tough detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) collaborates with Department of Health associate Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone) to research these mysterious deaths. The only way to find out though what really happened is to enter the site itself…
Our review:
Every new leap in communications technology seems to bring with it a handful of potboiler thrillers; even back in the 1930s, Bela Lugosi toplined Murder by Television. This world-wide-web-themed horror-thriller arrived just in time for the big internet market crash of the early 2000s, uploaded to take a byte out of your time.
While the alleged setting is New York City, it takes place in an archetypal noirish, dimly-lit metropolis, in which folks have started turning up dead, bleeding from the nose and eyes. Detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff), already smarting from the fact that he never caught a serial killer dubbed ‘The Doctor’ teams up with pretty medical examiner Terry Houston (Natascha McElhone) to sleuth out the common factor behind the deaths.
Each victim logged onto the titular pleasure-and-pain-laden webcam interactive site and feardotcom.com seems to somehow drive its subscribers insane via realisations of their worst fears (an echo of John Huston’s seldom-seen Phobia, 1980). There’s an early tip-off that the Doctor is somehow filling this online prescription for carnage. But how? Why? And what ISP is everybody using that their lethal computers never freeze up or crash like some of ours do?
The only surprise in the narrative worthy of the term is that there’s a literal Ghost in the Machine at work, not just a psycho with a killer operating system. And that the people at Apple didn’t get any product-placement Macs onscreen – shocker!
The movie’s not particularly entertaining, on the whole; amusing only if you’re a cultural commentator out to chronicle pop paranoia in the information age, and scariest chiefly if you happen to be the talent agent handling Stephen Dorff. Or of Stephen Rea, who guest-geeks as the verbose Doctor, who recites lines like “reducing relationships to anonymous electronic impulses is a perversion – but here we offer intimacy,” as he prepares to vivisect another unwilling female volunteer.
Coping with the fact that typing away at a terminal is not a stimulating visual, any way you slice it, director William Malone has mainlined much Dario Argento, Wes Craven and Blair Witch Project in preparation. Some critics were a tad impressed by all of the epileptic-seizure strobes and spookhouse bondage visuals (mostly pallid women being tortured) and opined that if this kind of imagery were in, say, an experimental short subject in the mid-20th century, Malone would be hailed as a mad genius of avant-garde expressionism. Okay, maybe. But it just said goth-music video to me.
Charles Cassady Jr, MOVIES & MANIA
For the trailer and more movie info please click the page 2 link below
MOVIES & MANIA provides previews of new films, our own movie reviews/ratings, and links to other reviews from trustworthy recommended sources - all in one handy web location. Plus, links to legitimately watch 1000s OF MOVIES FREE ONLINE via platforms such as Amazon Prime, Plex, Roku, Tubi and on YouTube. As an Amazon Associate, we earn a very tiny amount from any qualifying purchases.