"we will provide a lesson, that reducing relationships to electronic impulses is a perversion..."
It's Halloween month this month, which means we will be focusing on nothing but Horror movies throughout October and after the turgid abomination that was Alone in the Dark last week, we are about to find out if feardotcom will prove to be any better!
feardotcom, a 2002 Horror movie that I completely thought would be about a killer website transpired to be about a Serial Killer who broadcasts his torture and murders over the world wide web, but within the first 20 minutes quickly collapses into a ghost story a la The Ring or Grudge only absolutely nowhere near anywhere in their league.
Mike Reilly is... hang on I recognise that bloke... well what do you know it's Stephen Dorff who was also in Alone in the Dark! I genuinely didn't plan this... Mike Reilly is a Detective haunted by a past Serial Killer case (The Doctor) and his... friend? Girlfriend? Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone - who was great in this by the way) is erm... a Department of Health Researcher according to Google, team up to discover why a few people died in mysterious circumstances only to discover it all links back to Mike's old case; The Doctor! Because of course it does. They apparently couldn't catch the guy because the websites disappear right after the killing is done. Dude you should try the Wayback Machine or who.is? If he doesn't use domain protection you might have caught the guy before now.
Anybody familiar with Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 will recognise legendary actor Udo Kier playing Polidori; the guy in the Subway who dies straight away. What an absolute waste of an outstanding actor. Should have cast him as The Doctor.
So regrettably for feardotcom it really brings nothing to table we haven't seen before now and is very much your haunting of a vengeful ghost affair that has been done a hundred times before now relying on it's niche of said ghost being introduced by way of a website. Slender Man in essence explores the same sort of modus operandi years later and it failed in that experiment too. The movie relies on the shock of the gratuitous torture violence clips and spilling of blood to try and gross you out without really building on the substance it's made from, ultimately, I think, because it if did, it immediately wears quite thin. The script is very barebones; single lines of dialogue, no real character development, no fleshing out of relationships; in particular Mike and Terry hence why I have no idea what their actual romantic involvement is... if any... and despite it's emphasis being on the exhibitionism of torture and murder over the internet, it never really leans heavy on that and instead quickly explores the ghost story angle and the solving of the case.
However, for all the negatives, the cinematography was outstanding, as aforementioned Natascha McElhone has absolutely no business being cast in these torrid films and instead should be in Hollywood blockbusters and Stephen Rea as The Doctor/Alistair Pratt was suitably creepy, unsettling and pseudo-intellectual enough to play a good villain. Even our mate Stephen Dorff put in a halfway good enough performance, turns out he can act after all! But the complete lack of originality, off-tangent plot development and the insistence on portraying gratuitous violence to be unsettling rather than genuine psychological horror absolutely ruins the film as a production completely. But I would watch this again; for Natascha and for the Cinematography. 2 out of 5.
