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Really Surprised!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There is so much wrong with Feardotcom that it's hard to know where to start, but the most cardinal of sins that it commits is that it fails on pretty much every level to be even remotely scary or, indeed, horrific.Seasoned gore-hounds will find the sub-Event Horizon body horror blink-and-you'll-miss-it bondage gear montages laughably tame, whilst the completely incoherent script rob the film of any sort of atmosphere that could possibly rescue it from the celluloid scrap heap; really, the script is quite staggeringly bad - characters seem to communicate primarily through non-sequiturs, with the two leads seemingly falling in love (? - like so much in this picture, this is never particularly clear) via the single utterance "please don't go look at that site" only for the very next scene to be Stephen Dorff's cardboard cutout of Brad Pitt in Se7en doing exactly that. The site, so the story tells us, is something akin to the tape in The Ring; a cursed url that brings the unsuspecting viewer into contact with the spirit of a victim of Stephen Dorff's imaginatively-named serial killer, "The Doctor", given unlife by the collective energies of the internet (bear with me, this gets even less coherent) in order to exact revenge for her livestreamed torture-death by... killing anyone who watches it in 48 hours. Why this ghost, manifesting most often as a decidedly unfrightening little girl with ludicrous hair, is intent on murdering random people instead of the actual man who killed her is never adequately explained.Said victim, by the way, was a haemophiliac with a fear of knives, whose mother inexplicably alllowed her to play at an abandoned steel mill (which, you guessed it, is where "The Doctor" has taken his latest victim, a terminally stupid cinema usher who decided to go to a creepy abandoned theater because said creepy serial killer said he would cast her in a movie upon first interacting with her, with predictable results), and thus her method of supernatural murder is to kill people via their worst fears, causing them to stroke out and bleed profusely from the eyes.So we get Udo Kier hurling himself in front of a subway train for no apparent reason, a forensic programmer swarmed by poor CGI bugs hurling herself out of a window, a character introduced randomly then inexplicably translocated to the abandoned steel mill so that the ghost can spiritually drive his car into a wall, and lingering shots of a german student's corpses nipples after she apparently thought she was drowing in a bath tub. None of this is handled in any way scarily; we don't care about any of these characters, we are given no reason to care about them when the ghost unceremoniously offs them, and their deaths are so poorly-handled we care nothing for them afterwards.Anyway, back to the plot! Natasha McElhone's CDC investigator rushes to the psych ward where Stephen Dorff's detective has been - without explanation - committed, screams randomly at a nonplussed receptionist, is directed to his room, where he is in the throes of a fit that no doctors are present administering to. She recieves a phone call from the ghost, for some reason. I can't actually remember if this is before or after she herself visits the eponymous website for no apparent reason.She then goes to the abandoned steel mill in order to encounter the spoooooky blind old woman (who takes no further part in the plot in any way and is just hanging out in a run down industrial complex to be spooky to Natasha McElhone for some reason) and finds the corpse of the victim-cum-murder ghost. Yay! The haunting's over! ...Nope. Despite the movie outright yelling at us that this would end the haunting, it doesn't. Why? I don't know.Anyway, despite being the absolute worst detectives in the world, Dorff and McElhone finally track down "The Doctor" and rescue his latest victim, in the process Dorff gets offed and "The Doctor" gets Top Dollar from The Crow'd to death by the internet ghost. We end on McElhone, alone again, recieving a phone call. Is it Dorff? The Doctor? The Ghostly Victim Girl apologising for murdering the shit out of a bunch of random people?No! It's just the sound of static! What a fittingly stupid end to a 'horror' film in which the second most shocking thing present is the exposed nipples of a murder victim, and the first most shocking is the absolutely incomprehensibly bad script. Watch only if drunk and with friends, for some MST3K action, otherwise find something more productive and horrifying to do with your time like clip your toenails or grout the bathroom. Oh, and Jeffrey Coombs (the rather excellent Weyoun from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is entirely wasted as Dorff's asshole partner who communicates almost solely through orphaned sentences that have no relevance to anything going on around him.An absolute stinker, and legtimately one of the worst horror films I've ever seen. I'd rather watch Manos: The Hands of Fate twice back-to-back than subject myself to this cinematic turd again.

This dark and muddled movie almost gives a bad name to the internet. Underused actor Stephen 'Crying Game' Rea is completely wasted as a master psycho controller of a web site, which if you visit, shortly after, you die. The premise is interesting but is too unbelievable where there's a lot of dark slow moments. 'Power Of One' child actor Dorff puts the C in cool, in a strong and interesting 'tough guy' character performance, where a dim future awaits. He's accompanied by a very well played lead, where you hope, a sexual fling or relationship will develop. The film is ultimately bad and comes across as ludicrous, another malfunction of a film. There's hardly any violence on the whole, again a 'high level violence' warning as in how it's displayed, is a joke. The film comes up short on many things, and this one, on the latest view around, surprise surprise, I didn't like it anymore, as I liked it last time. Sadly it's Rea, who you only see in a number of scenes, who lucks out, in this with a genuine evil performance, with a voice to match. It's a performance that will go unnoticed or be forgotten, cause of the film's stuff ups or dislike for it. Yes, it's a site you don't want to visit, or the movie itself too.

This was not really the kind of movie that I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be a good, psychological thriller/horror, but unfortunately this movie was anything but that. Boy was I wrong.Feardotcom is basically a very, very poor imitation of The Ring with the whole "going to die after X amount of time/days" idea. Unlike The Ring, though, this story is pretty messy and in all honesty I thought it made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It just ends up jumping about from one scene to the next and for me it just loses track of itself. Even Stephen Dorff as Detective Mike Reilly couldn't save this from going down the pan. In fact, none of the main stars are really that good in it. Natascha McElhone, as Terry Huston, is quite dire (but she was excellent in Ronin) and even Stephen Rea, as "The Doctor" Alistair Pratt, is as bland as a weak cup of tea.All in all, this is a very disappointing movie and if you haven't seen it then don't worry because, believe me, you're not missing much at all.

Roger Ebert: "...even now it is one of the most graphic horror films I've seen... If the final 20 minutes had been produced by a German impressionist in the 1920s, we'd be calling it a masterpiece... The last 20 minutes are, I might as well say it, brilliant. Not in terms of what happens, but in terms of how it happens, and how it looks as it happens. The movie has tended toward the monochromatic all along, but now it abandons all pretense of admitting the color spectrum, and slides into the kind of tinting used in silent films: Browns alternate with blues, mostly...". If you read all the Roger Ebert's review of the film, he noted that the special effects are so good that "this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see".