A Disappointing Continuation

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There is so much wrong with Feardotcom that it's hard to know where to start, but the most cardinal of sins that it commits is that it fails on pretty much every level to be even remotely scary or, indeed, horrific.Seasoned gore-hounds will find the sub-Event Horizon body horror blink-and-you'll-miss-it bondage gear montages laughably tame, whilst the completely incoherent script rob the film of any sort of atmosphere that could possibly rescue it from the celluloid scrap heap; really, the script is quite staggeringly bad - characters seem to communicate primarily through non-sequiturs, with the two leads seemingly falling in love (? - like so much in this picture, this is never particularly clear) via the single utterance "please don't go look at that site" only for the very next scene to be Stephen Dorff's cardboard cutout of Brad Pitt in Se7en doing exactly that. The site, so the story tells us, is something akin to the tape in The Ring; a cursed url that brings the unsuspecting viewer into contact with the spirit of a victim of Stephen Dorff's imaginatively-named serial killer, "The Doctor", given unlife by the collective energies of the internet (bear with me, this gets even less coherent) in order to exact revenge for her livestreamed torture-death by... killing anyone who watches it in 48 hours. Why this ghost, manifesting most often as a decidedly unfrightening little girl with ludicrous hair, is intent on murdering random people instead of the actual man who killed her is never adequately explained.Said victim, by the way, was a haemophiliac with a fear of knives, whose mother inexplicably alllowed her to play at an abandoned steel mill (which, you guessed it, is where "The Doctor" has taken his latest victim, a terminally stupid cinema usher who decided to go to a creepy abandoned theater because said creepy serial killer said he would cast her in a movie upon first interacting with her, with predictable results), and thus her method of supernatural murder is to kill people via their worst fears, causing them to stroke out and bleed profusely from the eyes.So we get Udo Kier hurling himself in front of a subway train for no apparent reason, a forensic programmer swarmed by poor CGI bugs hurling herself out of a window, a character introduced randomly then inexplicably translocated to the abandoned steel mill so that the ghost can spiritually drive his car into a wall, and lingering shots of a german student's corpses nipples after she apparently thought she was drowing in a bath tub. None of this is handled in any way scarily; we don't care about any of these characters, we are given no reason to care about them when the ghost unceremoniously offs them, and their deaths are so poorly-handled we care nothing for them afterwards.Anyway, back to the plot! Natasha McElhone's CDC investigator rushes to the psych ward where Stephen Dorff's detective has been - without explanation - committed, screams randomly at a nonplussed receptionist, is directed to his room, where he is in the throes of a fit that no doctors are present administering to. She recieves a phone call from the ghost, for some reason. I can't actually remember if this is before or after she herself visits the eponymous website for no apparent reason.She then goes to the abandoned steel mill in order to encounter the spoooooky blind old woman (who takes no further part in the plot in any way and is just hanging out in a run down industrial complex to be spooky to Natasha McElhone for some reason) and finds the corpse of the victim-cum-murder ghost. Yay! The haunting's over! ...Nope. Despite the movie outright yelling at us that this would end the haunting, it doesn't. Why? I don't know.Anyway, despite being the absolute worst detectives in the world, Dorff and McElhone finally track down "The Doctor" and rescue his latest victim, in the process Dorff gets offed and "The Doctor" gets Top Dollar from The Crow'd to death by the internet ghost. We end on McElhone, alone again, recieving a phone call. Is it Dorff? The Doctor? The Ghostly Victim Girl apologising for murdering the shit out of a bunch of random people?No! It's just the sound of static! What a fittingly stupid end to a 'horror' film in which the second most shocking thing present is the exposed nipples of a murder victim, and the first most shocking is the absolutely incomprehensibly bad script. Watch only if drunk and with friends, for some MST3K action, otherwise find something more productive and horrifying to do with your time like clip your toenails or grout the bathroom. Oh, and Jeffrey Coombs (the rather excellent Weyoun from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is entirely wasted as Dorff's asshole partner who communicates almost solely through orphaned sentences that have no relevance to anything going on around him.An absolute stinker, and legtimately one of the worst horror films I've ever seen. I'd rather watch Manos: The Hands of Fate twice back-to-back than subject myself to this cinematic turd again.

A serial killer known as The Doctor (Stephen Rea) is streaming his gruesome handiwork live over the internet for the entertainment of twisted individuals. Meanwhile, the spirit of one of The Doctor's previous victims has set up her own online torture portal (don't ask me how), punishing those who are tempted to watch by killing them 48 hours later. New York cop Mike (Stephen Dorff) is on the case, aided by Department of Health worker Terry (Natascha McElhone).Director William Malone gave us the entertaining 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill, but his follow-up, Feardotcom, is far less satisfying: the plot is wholly unoriginal (it's basically The Ring, with a website instead of a video, plus a bit of torture porn), the convoluted script is a mess, the performances are weak, and the whole affair is given an aesthetic guaranteed to get my goat-trite blue and orange palette, rapid editing, and lots of dark imagery with flickering lighting (just like 90% of horror films from the same decade).In the film's most ridiculous scenes, both Mike and Terry visit feardotcom.com (why the double .com? See IMDb's trivia for the lame reason) despite being well aware of what will happen to them in two days' time. That's dedication beyond the call of duty, but also pretty damned stupid. As is this film.

True. It has flaws beyond bad or anything known as bad within this dimension within time and space we live in. But you know what? For a film as bad as Alone In The Dark (AITD movie has a 1% on Rotten Tomatoes), it probably comes nowhere as near or even close. True, this movie is very bad and literally has a mixture of too much plot with absolutely no plot at all, has literally either too many clichés or beyond too many for that matter, the acting,writing, and screenplay is sometimes very,very,very poor for a movie that made on a "very unquestionable budget of $40M-42M dollars", and yes, in itself, this is a horror movie, like The Fog remake, that has really questionable quality, and that this movie is a rip-off of Se7en, The Ring (both the original Japanese 1998 movie and it's American remake which came out the year this one came out), Kairo, Videodrome, and last but not least, the 1998 movie Strangeland. But do you want to know something? For a movie that seems to have 0% genius, this movie is as if it were made by someone who was just maybe, just maybe a genius, during the silent era, or at least the German Expressionist era. I guess this movie does seem to at least have some genius. 4.0 would probably be a better rating for this on this site.

With a whopping 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5 mil. opening weekend, that says a lot about Feardotcom. With such eerie promotion coupled with a unique premise, one can only wonder why audiences did not visit the site.Feardotcom revolves around the death of a man involved in an alleged unsolved murder. The man appeared to have seen something before he met his demise. What did he see? How did this projection get there? Detective Mike and scientist Terry team up to find the murderer or shall we say "host", but in order to do so they must embark on a website that kills its viewers within 48 hours.With that plot, you would think it would be easy for screenwriter Moshe Diamant to make sense of the film. Unfortunately, that is not the case. A recurring white ball bounces back and forth and left to right with no reason. An inaudible voice is uttered from a house phone with no thought as to whose voice it belongs to. Not even the website makes sense. From the first shot to the last, it is blatant that more thought was given to the production than the script (and oh how stellar some of the hallucinatory sequences look on cellulite). Aside from a nonsensical script, the dialogue is so on the nose you would fancy why Mike or Terry never had the urge to scratch theirs. Although, the film starts off interestingly enough. The title montage is quite ominous and effectively done. Not to mention the opening scene. The train station is so deathly quiet you could almost hear cells dividing. By the time the passenger meets their fate, you cannot help but keep watching even though you know the impact beforehand. However, it would help if the film was as strong as the opening. What I will say is that Feardotcom is consistent with its suspense. There is never a scene that is terse or abrupt in creating atmosphere. Not a single room is well-lit and each minute you go down it, you feel the terror of every second. Honestly, I feel if the film were a short movie, my rating would be higher. When the characters do not speak, we have a winner. When the brightness is lowered and the apparitions take center, you cannot help but look. Unfortunately, the film has this exposition that is just pompous and unnecessary. We want to see more of the website- not see the maker of the site, and then hear the antagonist's spoon-fed motive. In brief, Feardotcom does not deserve the 3% on Rotten Tomatoes. Technically, the film is superb. It has a nice blue hue and the rain looks pretty. I cannot say the same about the script though, which is why some of the negative feedback is deserved. If you choose to visit Feardotcom (not like the rest of the United States), you will be treated to some creepy and fascinating imagery. But if you choose not to visit the site, you would have probably made the right choice.