Customer Reviews

FeardotCom

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(89)

 

 

"Before you die, you see the ring." Oh wait, wrong movie...Who could blame me for confusing the two films? They have extremely similar plots. In this one, no one sees the ring, but they do de 48 hours after logging onto the website feardotcom.com--why not just fear.com is beyond me, maybe cause the site already existed? Anyway, it is up to tough detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff, who is always pleasant to watch) and Department of Health Associate Terry Huston (Natasha NcElhone, who is very beautiful and deserves a great movie) to research these mysterious deaths. The only way to find out what happened is to enter the site itself...pretty spooky huh??? Not really, and although not as scary or spooky as its far superior follower, feardotcom does deliver a few chills, and edge-of-the-seat suspense. Too bad its intriguing plot is never fully explored, and ended up disappointing. The set-up was quite intriguing, but the final result was one big mess. It is unfortunate because the film had incredible potential to go above the standard Hollywood "frightfest," but it does not succeed. There is no big pay-off and no logical explanation, confusing us more in the end than we were in the beginning. It falls apart from one too many ideas and plot holes you could -- and do -- get lost in. Overall there is some enjoyment and great visuals, but the screenplay needed a re-write.

The only fear in "Feardotcom" is the fear you will have wondering if you can survive watching this clunker. Directed by William Malone (who made the lousy remake of "House on Haunted Hill"), "Feardotcom" is a horror film so loaded with clichés; so weighed down with bad acting, a confusing script, plodding pacing, and continuity errors in the thousands that surviving the experience says something important about your mental and physical fortitude. If you do come out the other side unscathed, as I did, the most you will get out of the experience is the realization that you are a complete dunderhead for sticking with it when instinct told you to turn it off five minutes after the film started. It kills me to write such an acidic review of Malone's monstrosity only because actor Stephen Rea co-stars in it. Rea, if you aren't familiar with his acting, usually turns in excellent performances. His role as a conflicted yet sensitive forensics expert in the HBO drama "Citizen X" was one of the best acting gigs in the 1990s. Rea also starred in the critically acclaimed "The Crying Game." What he is doing in this boat anchor is a question for the ages. Maybe he needed the money. Maybe he owed a friend a favor. Maybe he went completely insane. Whatever the case, he should have passed on "Feardotcom." The damage to his career may well be irreparable.

I never felt as though I caught on to the plot in this film. Perhaps I am a lazy viewer who gets a little crabby when a movie doesn't reveal everything to me in an easy to understand way. Nah, that can't be it. If so, why would I watch films like "Fando & Lis" and "Begotten"? Challenging films don't usually bore me. Problem is, "Feardotcom" isn't the sort of movie you want to find challenging. The central idea of the film involves a nasty looking website called, what else, fear.com. Anyone who signs on for a peek dies mysteriously two or so days later. Why? Apparently, the ghost of a girl named Jeannine haunts the site and kills anyone who dares log on. Why? Apparently, Jeannine died at the hands of the nefarious Alistair Pratt (Rea), a psycho who abducts, tortures, and murders women so he can televise his handiwork live on the Internet. Now Pratt is staging a new round of webcam murders, seemingly unaware the revenant of one of his former victims seeks revenge. For the record, Alistair Pratt is a real loony who likes to whisper overwrought serial killer type lingo to his victims as he prepares to slice and dice for the entertainment of his fans. Rea is a great actor, but even he fails to pull Pratt's dialogue off in a convincing manner.

Enter stage left (or right) Detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) and Department of Health Inspector Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone). Reilly and Huston become involved in both the Pratt investigation and the website hauntings after a couple of German tourists accidentally film their experiences (and ultimate demises) with fear.com. Predictably, and after several other minor characters expire, Reilly signs on to the website in an effort to discover exactly what is going on. Start the clock, folks, because the cop only has forty-eight hours to crack the case before he ends up in a garbage bag down by the river. Sadly for Reilly, he ends up in the hospital for a time, thus leaving Huston to pick up most of the investigative duties. She discovers the secrets behind the Jeannine incident, finds the girl's corpse underwater, and eventually uncovers Alistair Pratt's secret lair. There's a big showdown between Reilly, Huston, Pratt, and the ghost of Jeannine before the credits mercifully ring down on a film that ought to find comparisons to such dreck as "Manos, The Hands of Fate" and "Invasion of the Blood Farmers." O.K., I am exaggerating; it's not as bad as those two films, but "Feardotcom" really ought to win some sort of award for bad filmmaking.

The movie's difficulties are just too much to overcome. First, the acting is insipid. Even Rea can't bring himself to inject a modicum of interest into his character. Dorff and McElhone resemble less human beings and more two of those wooden chiefs you used to see outside cigar shops. How can a viewer care about a film when he or she cannot care about any of the characters? Second, it's obvious Malone made his actors secondary to the special effects, a bad move here. "Feardotcom" is chock full of dark buildings, strobe light effects, and the sort of cheap shocks routinely employed by your local haunted house around Halloween. It's just not scary; I kept expecting the principal characters to break into an extended disco dance sequence with all those lights spinning around. Finally, the continuity errors massacre any hope the film had at success. Suspending disbelief is important in any film, but doing so here is impossible. It took several days for a hemophiliac to perish at the hands of Pratt? How did Huston find a body under all that submerged junk? Couldn't anyone in the world sign on to that website? Sigh.

The "Feardotcom" DVD contains loads of extras: a trailer for the film, cast and crew filmographies, a deleted scene that makes no sense whatsoever, an interview with the director, and a behind the scenes featurette. Maybe we should give it up for Malone and his "Feardotcom" juggernaut. How many films this bad manage to get a theatrical release in this day and age? Precious few, my friends, precious few. I think this one went in and out of the theaters so quickly it gave moviegoers whiplash. Even horror fans would do well to give this one a pass.

Wow! What a sense of deja-vu ! Was it just me or did the ghostly little girl bouncing the ball seem to be Carol Ann, lifted right out of the POLTERGEIST series? It put me in such a mood for the same sort of movie as those, that I eneed up disappointed, even though I never was a huge fan of POLTERGEIST and its sequels or their particular sub-genre of horror. Yes, FEAR DOT COM delivers even less than those. This film is muddled, sometimes resembling a supernatural shockfest, sometimes a detective story, and sometimes a cyber-thriller. And those disparate elements adhere together to make a coherent whole poorly if at all. I ended up not knowing for sure just what happened in this story or just how the title web site inexorably drew its victims into their fate. What's more, it didn't make me care that much. It's not like I missed anything I'd want to view the movie again to decipher -- just that there couldn't be anything there possibly un-confounded enough to hang in for and try to take in. It seems a worthy cast is wasted herein. I particularly hoped to see Natascha McElhone do more. I remembered her mainly from THE TRUMAN SHOW, in which she was a likable character one would want to see have a role in the story's outcome, only to see the movie treat her as a throw-away character as if we weren't supposed to care about her. But she gives us little more to care about in FEAR DOT COM, nor does any of the rest of the cast. The most memorable character herein remains the eerie little one bearing an uncanny resemblance to Carol Ann or a clone thereof, lurking through this movie's confusion. But there's virtually no light for her to lead anyone into this time.

While I adore Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, I should preface this review by warning you that I'm not the biggest fan of horror movies, so it's possible there are connoisseurs who can appreciate Feardotcom on levels I cannot. Possible, but not probable, judging by the vast ocean of negative feedback the theatrical release received.

My partner wanted to see this film and talked me into seeing it. The preview didn't look all that bad, the title amused me, and Stephen Rea happened to be in it, the talented star of The Crying Game. How bad could it be?

Astonishingly bad is the answer, and not in an "oh, but I love bad movies" kind of way. This is a monotonous, dull, confusing trainwreck of a film with nothing to redeem it but the occasional atmospheric camera shot. The plot has something to do with a website that contains a subliminal advertisement which triggers hallucinations of a little girl bouncing a ball. Somehow, these hallucinations lead to the characters' deaths, which didn't happen quickly enough for my liking, as none of them were particularly interesting. Even Stephen Rea fails to generate any real sense of emotion, momentum or (heavens forbid) danger, despite playing as macabre a villain as any in recent memory.

After apologizing for dragging me to it, my partner proceeded to kill the rest of our evening by fuming about what a terrible waste of film it was, and how shamelessly it ripped off The Ring, Poltergeist, Seven, etc. I can safely say I've had better evenings.

Derivative, rambling and incoherent, Feardotcom tries to be genuinely frightening, but succeeds only at being unpleasant. Not recommended.

I watched Fear Dot Com a few days ago with a friend and unforunately for me, I was the one who'd paid to rent it. The basic concept of the movie is actually pretty decent, involving a website (fear.com obviously) and people die from their own fears 48 hours after visiting it.

The problem is that the acting and screenplay are horrible. Many times the dialogue doesn't make sense. For example, near the beginning of the movie one line is "well at least we have the camcorder." The only thing is at the time you have no clue whatsoever what the actor in question is talking about. Evidently two of the people who visited the site and died had a camcorder and the investigators found it, but you don't realize this until later. Throughout most of the movie, the viewer is forced to make assumptions on their own because very little is explained in the movie and the dialogue is often very haphazard and in a few cases, utterly incoherent.

All in all, the movie ends up being boring. My friend left the room halfway through it and just went to bed. Since I'd paid for the rental I decided I'd watch the whole thing even if I didn't care for what I was watching. It really was not worth my money or time. Sure, some of the imagery presented is good, but it doesn't have a halfway decent plot to back it up with. Horror movies generally leave me with some sort of feeling or impression afterwards, but Fear Dot Com left me with nothing but the same feeling one has after watching an everyday primetime television sitcom--if even that.

Unfortunately there is no negative star rating on Amazon reviews... and if there were I doubt it would go as far into the negatives as I would care to rate it.

This was by far the suckiest bunch of suck that ever sucked. I can usually find a redeeming quality in even the worst of movies, but this one had nothing. Why did I even watch it all the way through? I was just waiting for something to make sense and for some surprise ending... but the best part of this movie was that I didn't pay to see it so the idiot that made it got no money from me.

There's really just no need to go into detail as to why this movie sucked... if you need to find one reason to watch this movie you've come to the wrong place, because this one isn't even worthy of spoofing on MST3K...

AHHHHH!!! Suck isn't even a good enough word to describe how bad this movie was. Imagine a great movie where you get so consumed by it that when it ends you realize you are back in the real world and the adventure is over... now imagine the complete opposite of that... where right from the beginning you are trying to figure out why you are watching it, what better things you could be doing with the time you are wasting watching it, and how much longer will it be before it ends... counting every second hoping it's a short movie.

Shame on you movie people for allowing such shlock to even be billed with real movies.

Granted, my expectations were extremely low before viewing film director William Malone's "Fear dot com" due to scathing critical reviews the movie received. Much to my surprise, this horror film was even worse than I could have possibly imagined. I suppose one could start with the muddled screenplay, the mimicking of better films and directorial styles, the waste of the talented actor Stephen Dorff, and a complete disregard for viewer sensibilities. But I think what truly offended me about "Fear dot com" was the lack of a single original idea drenched and camoflauged with pop psychology when dealing with voyeurism and perversion.

An absolute ..... of the superior "The Ring," which in turn was a remake of the Japanese cult classic "Rungu," "Fear dot com" tells the story of a police detective (Dorff) and health inspector (Natascha McElhone) stumbling across a series of unusual deaths linked by the victims having logged on to a website. After viewing this site, unlucky Internet surfers die within 48 hours. Naturally, Dorff and McElhone log on, and then must solve the mystery within the allotted time. Throw into this mix an especially sadistic serial killer (Stephen Rea) who tortures and kills women for Internet viewing pleasure. It's doubtful "Fear dot com" will ever play as a double feature with "The Yearling," but I suppoose anything is possible in Hollywood.

I appreciate William Malone's reverance for past horror films, noted by his interesting, if over-the-top remake of "The House on Haunted Hill" and the casting of old-time horror stars (Udo Kier, Jeffrey Combs, Michael Sarrazin) in supporting roles. But the world he recreates in "Fear dot com" is far too reminiscent of David Fincher's "Seven." In fact, Fincher's unique style (also seen in "The Game" and "Fight Club") has been completely stolen by Malone. Darkness of vision (and the soul) comes natural for Fincher. For Malone, it's forced and rather heavy handed.

I also do not particularly enjoy scenes (mostly insinuated) of young innocent women being kidnapped and tortured. When watching "Fear dot com," I was reminded of a very old film directed by William Friedkin in 1980 called "Cruising." An appalling movie experience which also dealt with a serial killer, it chose to immerse itself in filth and degradation in order to prove a point to us uneducated viewers. Such arrogance offended me then, and it offends me now.

"Fear dot com" is laughably bad. It shamelessly borrows from other films (all of them superior), producing a patchwork quilt of filmmaking laziness masquerading as high art.

I saw this movie in the theater and it was one of the worst movies I have EVER seen. I mean top 1 or 2 on my bad list. The movie was not scary, made little sense, and just overall.... I cant see how any movie this bad could make anything but a horrible dvd. Dont waster your time or money on this movie. If you must, rent it just to see how bad it actually is. The only reason I didnt leave the theater after the first 30 minutes is because I thought that there might be something redeeming in the last hour. Guess what! There wasnt.

STAY FAR FAR AWAY from this horrible movie.

I could barely wait for this movie to be over. It was putting me to sleep, it's cheesy, mostly because the killer "mad doctor" is a bad actor who was more absurd than scary.
The whole concept is not bad, but the movie was long and stupid and really annoying, and not that scary.
Fear for your money......

Unless you have some brain disorder in which you love watching people getting hacked up and sliced open this movie is not for you. This is by far the most pointless and stupid movie I have ever seen. The plot is that some crazy guy tortured a woman with knives and etc. for 2 days and then killed her. If you go to his death website and don't help the woman get revenge on her murderer, you die of your worst fear in 48 hours (because sharp objects were her worst fear because she had hemophilia and she was tortured for 2 days). Another thing, how can anyone be scared of the internet?!?!?!? Unless you go to websites of people getting killed you have nothing to be scared of. And how is it entertainment to see people getting tortured and cut up by a psychopathic maniac/lunatic?!?!?!? This movie is poorly filmed, too. It steals ideas from other movies such as the Ring and makes them worse. I would rather watch the Cell again...overthis movie...In fact this was so bad and pathetic that I can't even call it a movie. It is horrible...