FeardotCom Information

FeardotCom is a 2002 horror film directed by William Malone and starring Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone and Stephen Rea.

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

Reception

Critical

The film received an extremely negative response from critics. It currently holds a 3% 'rotten' rating on movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on eighty-seven reviews.

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."

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.