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fear dot com

fear dot com

List Price: $14.97
Your Price: $13.47
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: fear dot com.com
Review: i had high expectations for this movie. The suspense isnt what i thoght it would be, and alot of charactors in the story mean nothing. the objects in the movie that are symbolic dont mean anything to the story. But it wasnt as good as i thought, so dont waste your time.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Different, Gets Your Pulse Racing
Review: This movie is not as bad a other reviews make it out to be. It is slow in the first twenty minutes but it picks up well from there. I did expect more from it but it did a good job to scare me. If nothing else the little girl in it will make you look over your shoulder twice. Also it is very different than anything else out to rent or buy today . Finally a horror movie that is actually different than every other horror movie out there.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Relax
Review: The movie makes perfect sense if you know what they are trying to get across. If the movie made no sense to you, why review it? The lighting in the movie was superb as was the editing. As far as the plot goes, we are probably not (as a society) far from this taking shape on the internet. I think the "David Lynch", comment was perfect. If you can understand his films you will be okay. Otherwise, if you're looking for just a hair raising horror movie this probably isn't for you.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Horror & Websurfers Delight
Review: I just viewed FearDotCom last night, despite the mixed reviews that I had heard from different critics. Not being one to blindly accept the advice of others, and finding the video box to be highly tittilating, I knew I had to have a closer look. Not disappointed.
I found FearDotCom to be a highly stylized film, full of rich atmospheric tension, and taut horror suspense. The ingenious use of dark & grainy scenery and disturbing images was an invaluable contribution to the films interestingly original story.
I believe in fact that director William Malone lived up to his previous House On Haunted Hill. A well crafted plot, albeit the ending is somewhat less than spectacular, definitley worhty of a look. I don't believe that any horror fan, or avid web buff will be disappointed by Malone's investigation of the darker side of the net. On the Amazon Rating Scale this film receives a 3. On ym personal rating scale, it receives a 3.5.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bottom-of-the-barrel horror filmmaking.
Review: No sense of danger. No interesting characters. No good lines. Nothing except a lot of CGI, music-video-style images, incredibly predictable sound cues, and the bewilderment of watching a host of good actors wasting away under the twin assault of inane scripting and direction.

The concept was pretty much doomed to begin with, the frivolous nature of the internet being a poor conduit for the mystical mumbo-jumbo of the script. That didn't stop director William Malone from making a stab at it. But FearDotCom commits the same sin as his previous effort, The House on Haunted Hill, and to a farther extent: Namely, too much playing with camera and lighting, and no genuine threat. I could literally predict, to the second, when the next loud, obnoxious sound cue was coming to try to scare me.

Considering how much effort was put into the cinematography -- strictly on a photographic level, the film looks good -- one wonders at some of the glaring aesthetic gaffes. The "feardotcom.com" website in the film looks like it was designed by a 17-year-old, complete with Buffy-style fonts, too much animation, and an overall cheesiness that suggested a horror spoof. The various abodes of the characters don't offer much of a sense of character, and thanks to Malone's addiction to flashy white lights, all of the locations are flattened to a homogenous flur. That's probably also because none of the characters, including the protagonists, was given more than 10 seconds of character development, making their death and suffering completely innocuous...and therefore not gripping at all. This despite the game effort of the cast, which (stunningly) includes top-flight talent Stephen Rea, the terrific Natascha McElhone thrown away in a transparent role, and Stephen Dorff, who shows none of the grit he had displayed in the past, probably because of the impoverished script. The relationship between "Mike" (Dorff) and "Terry" (McElhone) is simply laughable. And Rea's scenes until the finale look like they were all shot in one day, so stagnant and uninteresting are they.

One of Malone's greatest follies was to repeat what Joel Schumacher's 8mm did. In Schumacher's film, the central piece of horror -- the snuff film -- is never shown, thus rendering all efforts to investigate its origin senseless. In FearDotCom, the "horror" of the film is supposed to be anchored by "Alistair"'s torture of his victim, but since Malone never shows the more excruciating details, FearDotCom falls squarely into the category of all bark, no bite.

The script makes the same mistake as most post-'80s horror scripts, which is to confuse 'horror' with 'suspense'. Writer Josephine Coyle, unfortunately, tried to write a detective story out of the concept. First rule of horror: Keep things simple. Did The Exorcist need a whodunit plot? Did the first Halloween need to provide a motive for knife-wielding maniac Michael Myers? Did Night of the Living Dead waste time trying to find a scientific explanation for the zombie uprising? Scream started the trend, and unfortunately it's rendered horror movies into ungainly whodunit stories with a little more gore. Add that to the music-video stylings of directors like Malone, and you got vacuous "horror" films such as FearDotCom, 8mm, The House on Haunted Hill, and the like.

The only thing I enjoyed in this film was the "mouse" gag, several minutes into the film. Hardly worth the rental price.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Fear Dot ....
Review: Words simply cannot describe how awful this film is. Most movies, no matter how bad, have one or two positive aspects to comment upon. However, none are to be found in Fear Dot Com, the worst movie of the year.

Things start off bad and get worse when a man is meandering about in the subway tunnels, chasing a small girl playing with a white ball. Naturally, he is hit by a train, immediately killing him. Four others soon die, and computer geek Denise finds that the one thing that the five victims had in common was the website feardotcom.com. Apparantly, the website, which offers visitors live shots of a woman being tortured by a man called "the doctor" (Stephen Rea), kills those who are daring enough to watch the grisly images. The victims all die two days to the minute after they log on to the fear site. How the website kills its visitors is really never explained. It's up to NYPD detective Stephen Dorff and Health Department drone Natasha McElhorne to stop "the doctor" before more internet fans fall victim to his devious website. Sound horrible? It is.

William Malone, director of 1999's House on Haunted Hill, barrages the viewer with strange, trippy images in a pathetic attempt to thrill and chill. These scenes worked in "Hill" because they were brief and didn't appear nearly as often as they do here in "Fear". However, all the blame can't be cast upon Malone, he doesn't have a coherent script to work with. The dialogue is downright laughable at times.

Acting is another downer here, with Dorff doing nothing but curse the entire time. McElhorne looks like a scared rabbit the entire film, contributing absolutely nothing. Rea, however, turns the worst performance as "The Doctor". Now, this talented man appeared in award nominated films such as "The End of The Affair" and "The Crying Game". Why he has sunk to this level of trash is absolutely incomprehensable.

For the past three years, Malone has been involved with three horror films that have been released around Halloween. The first, House on Haunted Hill was a bonafied hit, featuring A-list stars, a winning storyline, and some genuine laughs. Next came Thirteen Ghosts, which was a definite step down from from Hill. "Ghosts" featured barely B-list stars, a horrible plot, and some pathetic attempts at humor. Fear Dot Com, however makes Thirteen Ghosts look like an Oscar contender. You'll be laughing, not at any jokes, but rather at this complete mess of a movie.

Avoid this movie at all costs. It has absolutely no positive aspects to speak of. Upon viewing it, you'll be wishing that "The Doctor" will come kill you within two minutes rather than two days.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Logon and Play with Death...
Review: The bodies of four individuals are found and they all have similar symptoms, blood running from their eyes. This is a mystery to the Health Department and the Police Department, who have put their best resources on the job--Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone) from the Health Department and Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) from the Police Department. As they recover some evidence from hard drives, it seems like they all have been on a website 48 hours before their death. Feardotcom is a horror story that does not set the audience in the fright it intends to as a result from from stiff acting, a rough draft script, and excessive directing that creates a fabricated atmosphere.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: It's a renter
Review: Don't waste your money on this one. I love a good sci-fi flick and I love a good suspense/horror flick. This one tried to do both and unfortunately came up 0 for 2. If you are a budding film special effects student and want to see how a couple million can be blown on special effects for an otherwise worthless film, go rent this. Otherwise, save your money and watch something else...

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Waste-O-Time.Com
Review: The fact that I wasted an hour & 1/2 of my life on watching this movie makes me more angry than the bad acting and predictable screenplay. It follows to close to the movie "The Ring" which was actually worth watching! This movie is horrible....

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A creepy and ghastly mess
Review: The movie deals with a NYPD detective (Stephen Dorff) and a Department of Health worker (Natasha McElhone) who work together to investigate why people die within 48 hours of logging onto a website. (This movie reminded me of the movie "The Ring" and it seemed like another American remake of the Japanese horror-movie "Ringu".) While the images are creepy, disturbing and graphic (there are a lot of scenes that depict torture), the storyline is chaotic and illogical. I didn't know whether this movie was trying to be a horror movie, a ghost story, or a serial killer movie. It tried to be everything and turned out to be a complete mess. The graphic and creepy images are really hard to get out of your mind once you see this movie, however. It is definitely not for the squeamish!


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