Thursday, August 12, 2010

Turdsday Movie Review: Fear Dot Com (2002)

Partly a rip-off of The Ring and partly a rip-off of What Lies Beneath, this steaming turd of a film doesn’t even reach the basic level of competency that even the worst horror movies manage to reach. It’s not just implausible, it’s completely nonsensical.

If you lock your disbelief in a box and buy into the supernatural-transference-via-the-internet notion, you’re then insulted by a screenplay that suggests a dead woman’s spirit, who just wants to avenge her death, kills everyone who tries to help. It could not make any less sense even if the writer had intended for it to make no sense at all.

But, is it scary? Hardly. The scariest death in this film is that of Stephen Rae’s career.

Possibly the most frightening thing after that is watching Jeffrey Combs (of Re-Animator fame) trying to be a “serious” actor, as Stephen Dorf’s police detective partner. In fairness, his character is limited by a screenplay that simply asks him to repeat the line “leave it for the feds” fifty times, but he is still atrocious.

I’d heard bad things about Fear Dot Com, and assumed it was the usual horror genre bashing that accompanies most modern horror films. I was wrong. Fear Dot Com is pure, unadulterated, stupidity, and sets a new low for horror films. Actually it sets a new low for films of all genres. No suspense. No horror. No sense… No stars.

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