director
William Malone
screenwriter
Josephine
Coyle
story by
Moshe Diamant
producers
Limor Diamant
Moshe Diamant
cinematographer
Christian Sebaldt
music
Nicholas Pike
editor
Alan Strachan
cast
Stephen Dorff (Mike Reilly)
Natascha McElhone (Terry Houston)
Stephen Rea (Alistair Pratt)
Udo Kier (Polidori)
Amelia Curtis (Denise)
Jeffrey Combs (Sykes)
Nigel Terry (Turnbull)
Gesine Cukrowski (Jeannie)
Michael Sarrazin (Frank Bryant)
Jana Güttgemanns (Little Girl)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: August 30,
2002
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other william
malone films
reviewed on this website:
- house
on haunted hill (1999)
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Those who haven't seen half-naked
women being tortured in a movie in a long time and have been
pining for it might want to know about Feardotcom. The
rest of us can stay home and wonder why horror movies never fixate
on bald, fat, ugly, half-naked guys being tortured (or
is that just a naïve question?). Feardotcom, a cheapjack
foreign-shot film (Luxembourg and Montreal double for New York
City) distributed by the formerly prestigious Warner Bros., is
another one of those freak shows that pretend to denounce misogynistic
crime while showing us as much of it as the R rating will allow.
For some reason known only to him, Roger Ebert's review praised the film's visuals; gee,
Roger, you mean the one of the woman being dissected alive, or
the one of the woman drowning in a tub?
Stephen Dorff is a cop obsessed
with the one that got away -- Alistair Pratt, a.k.a. "The
Doctor" (Stephen Rea), a maniac who has eluded capture for
years. Dorff starts finding corpses that appear to be the victims
of a crash-and-bleed-out virus; Natascha McElhone, as a public
health official, gets called in and concludes that it isn't a
virus -- not the physical kind, anyway. Each victim, you see,
had visited a website called feardotcom.com 48 hours before their
death (kind of close to the premise of the 1998 Japanese horror
film The
Ring -- whose American remake
arrives next month -- but never mind). This is connected in some
way with "The Doctor" and his first victim, seen in
visions as a spooky little girl with a white ball.
Ebert advised focusing on the
imagery and disregarding the plot, but most of us go to a movie
to be told a story, not to be flashed with shock cuts of repugnant
violence. That's neither horror nor good filmmaking -- it's peek-a-boo
editing-table gimmickry, and you or I could do the same thing
given the budget. Watching Feardotcom is often like being
splashed with sewage by a Super-Soaker. At its core is the tired
device of the little girl trying to communicate with the living
and get revenge on her murderer, which might be nice if we hadn't
seen it in The
Sixth Sense and Stir
of Echoes, to name two. The theme of voyeurism biting
the voyeur in the throat (the victims are being punished for
the sin of watching death) is as old as Euripides. Without anything
original onscreen to speak of, there's nothing to hold one's
attention but the squalid "innovation" of creative
torture.
Unaccountably written by a
woman (Josephine Coyle) and directed by William Malone, whose
House
on Haunted Hill remake three years ago was sort of fun,
Feardotcom has apparently picked its supporting cast to
please genre fans; Jeffrey Combs (The Re-Animator) turns
up as a jaded cop, Michael Sarrazin (Frankenstein: The True
Story) is a drunken crackpot author of a book on Internet
secrets, Nigel Terry (Excalibur) is McElhone's ill-fated
supervisor (he dies the way everyone else does, a victim of his
worst fear), and, most promisingly, the great Udo Kier (Blood
of Dracula) opens the film as a man amusingly named Polidori,
who loses a human-vs.-subway-train match. Fans will have to content
themselves with the mere presence of these cult icons, though,
since Malone mainly sticks to Dorff and McElhone, both of whom
have been better, and Stephen Rea, visibly bored playing a cyber-boogeyman
who spouts psycho-visionary nonsense.
Feardotcom annoyed me; I experienced it almost
as a personal affront, because, to give Ebert his due, there
is a certain twisted visual pizzazz at work here (as there
was in The
Cell, another grotesque favorite of Ebert's -- can this
be the same man who crusaded against I
Spit on Your Grave?). But it's put in service of an inept
plot that uses its teases of (female) flesh and blood to keep
us interested, or -- dare I say it -- entertained. Feardotcom
is a rancid little slaughterhouse. At one point, "The Doctor"
announces that he wants to make death look ugly so that it'll
be taken seriously, and no doubt the makers of Feardotcom
would use a similar line. And it would be just as self-serving
and irrelevant.
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