Fear Dot Com (.com)

A Review

by Shad

"Don't be afraid, this would never happen...ghosts or not."

What started out as a hopeful psychological horror flick eventually declined until even the main characters went into denial. Fear Dot Com, the latest horror effort from the creator of the remake of The House on Haunted Hill, pushes itself as a scary, thrilling ride through the world of internet horror. A website, created by a serial killer simply known as The Doctor, is affecting its subscribers somehow, and eventually causing them to die of their worst fears within 48 hours of logging on to feardotcom.com .….uhm, .com. That’s the good news. The bad news? Steven Dorff is our only hope. But even still, this seems all psychological and creepy, and there is just no way that this could become something uber-cheezy like The Net, right?

Think again. Early in the film, we meet Stephen Dorff’s character, a street-wise detective on the homicide division who has been chasing a serial killer, who calls himself The Doctor, for about 4 years. He meets a forensic scientist named Terry (played by a forgettable actress) who doesn’t really get out much and loves bugs. Somehow, Stephen Dorff finds himself strangely attracted to her, and we believe they will probably make with the love at some point in the film. This never happens.

As for the whole plot thing about feardotcom.com, all the fans of the .com inter-web site love seeing the torture and the killing on the web site, even though it’s probably all taken from old Faces Of Death tapes from the 80’s. For some reason, these people die within 48 hours (remember, 48 hours is REALLY important, as it is the only actual clue that Stephen Dorff discovers, except for the feardotcom.com .com website) with blood dripping from their eyes, ears, nose and throat. What sounds like a disease (or, in my opinion, a really messed up case of flu-related post-nasal drip) is actually something far more sinister. So, it must be The Doctor, programming the website with all kinds of cookies and hackers so that looking at the .com site makes the person go crazy and gives them some sort of a seizure in 48 hours, right? Wrong, asshole…it’s a fucking ghost.

So, having all that suspense and psychological buildup flushed completely down the toilet at this point, it’s time to investigate this weird ghost problem `a la Scooby Doo (except WAY more fucked up, and no Don Knotts cameo, either).  Eventually the detective and the scientist both log onto feardotcom.com because they are morons and do not understand the concept of dying by freaky poltergeist shit. I don’t want to give too much more away, but you can see where I’m going with this. By the end of the movie, we’ve scratched our head so many times that our shirt makes us look like we need some Selsun Blue.

In the end, the movie loses all hope of ever having anything consisting of a plot, or any consistency for that fact. Actually, there not really even any sex, gore, or violence, unless you count some skinny stick struggling to get away from The Doctor on some old theater stage with strobe lights and Rammstein playing full-blast – as violence. All in all, this would have been a great idea if this was a Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd suspense thriller about a hypnotherapist gone psycho killer with a passion for web-streaming murder. But unfortunately, this film couldn’t even hold a candle to the haunted house scene in Fantasy Mission Force…at least that was remotely funny.

In the end, we finally learn why absolutely not, under any circumstances, and for the sake of your own life, should you log on to feardotcom.com (or Fear Dot Com, for that matter), because it sucks.