Fear dot com is not a pleasure to watch, nor is it a
very good movie; but it delivers chills down your spine when
presenting its best material. There is not one frame where torture,
or dialogue explaining torture, is not present. Though the torture
is what makes you scared, and the film wouldn’t be as good without
it. The absent-mindedness of the story is infallible in sending fear
to viewers’ brains; shocking them while keeping its indigenous wit.
The acting is poor, the screenplay is horrible, but the intrepid
flare that the scares are able to maintain is wonderful. The whole
thing has potential, but I will never be able to recommend it; the
obvious flaws are irreversible because of the mediocre script and
casting.
The film
itself is about a website that can eventually kill you. On the page
you see murderous torture take place that will eventually drive its
viewers insane. If that’s not enough, there is a woman on it that
constantly taunts you to “come and play.” The word “play” is used as
a synonym of the word “kill”; and the phrase “come and play” is
asking the viewers of the site if they want to be killed. The
material eventually drives people insane, creating a diversion in
their minds; their subconscious tells them that they want to die.
Fear dot com explains death like it’s some sort of
relief for the suffering the world causes. This scheme has been used
a thousand times before in movies, though the internet has never
been incorporated into the premise.
There are two
agents working on the case that comes up, caused by the
unexplainable deaths of the many viewers of the website that wanted
to play a little too much. When the agents find that the trigger of
all of this pandemonium is the “fear site”, they hire a woman to
restore an old computer hard-drive that the site was originally
created on. She must transfer all of the recoverable files to her
own for investigational purposes. Once she boots the computer with
the newly added files on it up; she is immediately sucked into the
fear sites wrath and is set to die forty-eight hours later. As the
story continues and fate takes its play, the two agents find her
dead and can’t resist the urge to look at “feardotcom.com”
themselves, even though they know the consequence. Will they die in
the end? Only god knows. You can take mischievous ride of
Fear dot com, but if you would like to be spared from this
marginally amusing creation; e-mail me and I’ll tell you if you just
if you have to know.
One of the
more redeeming features in of this flick was the interesting film
editing, done by Alan Strachan. Their selection in cuts to
use (despite the directors priority choice) was done to a unique and
catchy scale, and was one of the more visually appealing aspects of
the film. I especially enjoyed the scenes with various 2 second
clips, violently cut, that mesh together with a deviously creative
original score. When you watch them you feel like you’re in the
twilight zone (though they are fun to watch because of their
interestingly bizarre feel). These surprisingly made the movie more
haunting, it’s amazing how big of an impact that the people
off-screen can make on a film.
I can’t
believe that I even was remotely entertained by such an on-screen
disaster. This movie is similar to Resident Evil and
xXx; you’ll enjoy it if you just turn of your brain and
except what they have to say. Though extremely grisly and torturous
the vile, bloody, and gross images didn’t seem to bother me much
because they were well acted (unlike the rest of the picture).
Fear dot com is worth a look when it comes onto HBO or
Showtime, but other than that; I can’t say much for it at all.
-Danny, Bucket Reviews