FeardotCom

FeardotCom
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	William Malone
Written by	Moshe Diamant Josephine Coyle
Produced by	Limor Diamant Moshe Diamant Jean-Marc Félio
Starring	Stephen Dorff Natascha McElhone Stephen Rea
Cinematography	Christian Sebaldt
Edited by	Alan Strachan
Music by	Nicholas Pike
Production companies	MDP Worldwide ApolloMedia Fear.Com Productions Ltd. Carousel Film Company Film Fund Luxembourg DoRo Fiction Film GmbH Filmyard Underwaterdeco Pixar Animation Studios Luxembourg Film Fund Milagro Films Signature Pictures
Distributed by	Walt Disney Pictures
Release dates	9 August 2002 (South Korea) 30 August 2002 (United States)
Running time	101 minutes
Countries	United Kingdom Germany Luxembourg United States
Language	English
Budget	$40 million
Box office	$18,902,015

FeardotCom is a 2002 horror film directed by William Malone and starring Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone and Stephen Rea. The film opened on August 9, 2002 to almost universally negative reviews and was a Box office bomb, grossing only $18,902,015 against it's $40 million budget.

Plot

Mike Black Reilly (Stephen Dorff) is an NYPD detective who is called to the scene of a mysterious death in the subway system. The victim, Polidori (Udo Kier), exhibits bleeding from his eyes and other orifices and, by the frozen look on his face, appears to have seen something horrifying before being hit by a train.

Department of Health researcher Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone) is intrigued by the find as well, particularly when several more victims show up with identical symptoms.

When a contagious virus is ruled out, Terry and Mike team up to discover what might be killing these people. Initially they were unable to find anything to connect the deaths together, after some more digging for clues they eventually discover that all of the victims' computers crashed shortly before their passings. They send each of the victims hard drives to Mike's friend, Denise Stone (Amelia Curtis), who is a forensic specialist.

Denise discovers that all of the victims had visited a website called Feardotcom which depicts voyeuristic torture murder. Upon looking at the site herself, Denise is subjected to various sights and sounds of torture that eventually drive her crazy and result in her falling to her death from her apartment window.

Mike feels guilty, thinking that he should have never gotten Denise involved in the case. Terry figures out that people who visit the website die within 48 hours, apparently from what they feared most in their lives. Despite such dangerous knowledge, both she and Mike visit the site in order to figure out what is happening.

As they begin to experience paranoia and hallucinations (like the deceased), including that of a young girl and her inflatable ball, they race against time to figure out if any of it has any connection to an extremely vicious serial killer, Alistair "The Doctor" Pratt (Stephen Rea), who's been eluding Mike for years.

It is revealed that Feardotcom is, in fact, a ghost site made by one of Pratt's first victims, who is seeking revenge because people watched her being tortured and murdered. She was tortured by Pratt for 48 hours before she begged him to kill her, which explains why the victims have 48 hours to live. Mike and Terry track down Pratt and release the spirit of the murdered girl from the website, which kills Pratt. However, Mike is also killed.

The ending scene shows Terry lying in her bed with her cat, staring at the ceiling.

Cast

• Stephen Dorff as Detective Mike Reilly
• Natascha McElhone as Terry Huston
• Stephen Rea as Alistair Pratt
• Udo Kier as Polidori
• Amelia Curtis as Denise Stone
• Jeffrey Combs as Sykes
• Nigel Terry as Turnbull

Reception

Box office

On a budget of $40 million, the film grossed only $5,710,128 on it's opening weekend, $13,258,249 Domestically and $18,902,015 worldwide, resulting in a huge Box office bomb.

Reception

The film received extremely negative reviews from critics, as the film currently holds a 3% 'rotten' rating on movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 99 reviews, with the critics consensus: As frustrating as a 404 error, Fear Dot Com is a stylish, incoherent, and often nasty mess with few scares. At Metacritic, the film holds a 16% rating based on 20 reviews, indicating "Overwhelming dislike". The film was criticized for its lack of originality, specifically, the plot seems to be too derivative of Ring, even though Feardotcom came out two months before the American version of The Ring. The premise is also very similar to that of Japanese film Kairo, released in 2001, and David Cronenberg's Videodrome. It was further criticized for an R rating, due to the film originally rated NC-17 after going through 10 different cuts.

Empire magazine gave the film one out of five stars, calling it "arguably the least imaginative, most pathetic horror of the decade. " The Guardian called it a "nasty, badly acted horror film [...] like Marc Evans' My Little Eye or Olivier Assayas' execrable Demonlover, it manages to be both prurient and very, very naive about the internet. " Roger Ebert, while not giving it a positive review, gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "strange, how good FeardotCom is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see" and praising the last 20 minutes as something which, if it "had been produced by a German impressionist in the 1920s, we'd be calling it a masterpiece." and said that "The movie is extremely violent; it avoided the NC-17 rating and earned an R, I understand, after multiple trims and appeals, and even now it is one of the most graphic horror films I've seen."

Andrew Manning of Radio Free Entertainment stated that "Of all the trash I had to watch in 2002, the insipid FearDotCom easily ranks among the worst.", while Oz of eFilmCritic.com stated: "In a year that has given us some of the worst films of all time, this must surely rank as the worst -- and that's a hard thing to do opposite Master of Disguise."

Awards and nominations

FeardotCom won 'Worst Film' at the 2003 Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards and 'Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Silver' at 2003 Fantafestival. It was nominated for 'Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Gold' at the 2004 Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival and 'Best Film' at the 2002 Catalonian International Film Festival.

Home media

The film was released on DVD on January 14, 2003. A director's cut version of the film, which would be the original NC-17 rated version, has not been announced yet.

See also

• List of ghost films

External links

• FeardotCom at IMDb