fear dot com

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 fear dot com. 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?). fear dot com, 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 reasons 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 Ringu, 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 fear dot com 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 was sort of fun, fear dot com 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.

fear dot com 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. fear dot com 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 fear dot com would use a similar line. And it would be just as self-serving and irrelevant.

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