Fear Dot Com

Something strange is going on. Folks seem to be dying 48 hours after logging on to a certain website called feardotcom.com. Thankfully for us, a cute detective and a nerdy health professional are on the case. They search, they investigate, they find stuff. Then, they try to figure it all out and the next thing you know…you’ve got yourself a shit movie. Fear-dot-comming ensues.

Grungy atmosphere, slick visuals, depressing mood…all decent candy to set yourself up for a solid horror movie, right? Well, it could’ve been, if only the filmmakers hadn’t forgotten to add that one important ingredient which generally makes movies a little more entertaining: a sensible plot!! This movie sets up a halfway decent premise about a “killer” website, fiddles around with it for over an hour while the so-called “sleuths” miss every single clue in the book, and ultimately loses all comprehensibility when they try to explain it all to the audience. And while it’s high on style and gloomy SE7EN-ish locations at first, it quickly becomes redundant as we note one victim getting killed off the website, then another, then another, then another, etc… “Uhhhm, can we get on with it already?!” In the meantime, Stephen Dorff’s character, the man who’s buzzing all over this strange phenomena, is about as clueless as a straight man in a gay bar, while his sidekick, Natascha McElhone, encapsulates the personality of wet shoe. And after about sixty minutes of MTV-edited visuals flying before my busy eyes and various people getting killed (in pretty boring ways, I might add) and leaving the theater, the “resolution” comes forth and not only does is not make any sense, it’s also badly edited, quickly slapped together and ultimately, ridiculous. The sad part is that the Arrow and I actually attempted to put some of the bullshit together after our viewing (“If she was there, then where was…?”), but all we got were greater headaches and more questions unanswered.

If anyone can clearly explain the details of what the fuck this website was, how it did the things it did, who was behind it and how it played into the grander scheme of things…toss me an email and I’ll give you a big wet one in return. There was also a “doctor” character in the movie who I believe was supposed to be scary, but just sounded too idiotic to take seriously and had zero motivation. There was also the detective’s “partner” who did nothing more than complain and be a prick the whole time, and as some of the film’s characters started to get knocked off here and there, I could actually sense my indifference mounting. And is it me or did they actually attempt to create some kind of “romance” between the two leads to boot?? Ugh, whatever that was…it didn’t work either!! A couple of boo scares did work however, but most of the voyeur stuff got old after a while and some of it was just disgusting for the sake of it, with little or any substance behind any of it. Even the trickle of tit shots didn’t do much for me. Other than that, if you want to rent this turd and play it in the background of your house party, it might not be a bad idea, since the visuals and dingy style are pretty wicked but seeing as the characters are paper-thin and dumb, the plot is incomprehensible and the movie basically just goes around in circles most of the time, don’t bother watching it as a serious horror flick because the only thing you’ll get out of it is a serious case of the fuck yous. And to answer the two main questions that the website was asking its victims throughout this movie: “Do you want to watch?” No. “Do you want to hurt me?” Yes…oh yes…very badly!!

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian