Harefooted Halloween: Feardotcom

What I Liked: Not a whole lot.

What I Didn’t Like: Let’s move on.

Overall Impressions: There are a few quirky things about this guy and I’d like to go bullet points for a while, you all cool with that?  Good.  So:

·         The production design, cinematography and a few plot elements are heavily influenced by Se7en.  The lighting is dark, everything is very filthy, it’s almost always raining outside, the setting is a nameless city (although license plates indicate NY), dead bodies keep piling up mysteriously with cryptic messages sprawled on walls and etc.  Look Se7en is one of the best films ever made so I get that it inspired a lot of filmmakers but it’s such a specific style to mimic.  Pictures like The Glimmer Man, Kiss the Girls, Fallen, The Bone Collector and others tried to do the same with varying degrees of success.  I don’t remember this happening with other thrillers from the time like The Silence of the Lambs or whatever.

·         I find it amusing that the name of the website in the movie is feardotcom.com.  Apparently the filmmakers wanted it to be fear.com but were unable to wrangle it away from the owners.  The workaround to make it dotcom.com and keep it all one word like how you would type it in the address bar is both genius and hilariously stupid.

·         Is this movie considered part of the dot com bubble?  It could’ve been the final casualty.

·         Strange character actor Udo Kier (End of Days) makes a quick appearance in the beginning as the first victim (spoiler) and Stephen Dorff (The Gate) plays the main detective character making this a mini Blade reunion.  They don’t share any scenes though.  Well, not in the true sense anyway since one plays a corpse.

·         Of course with this coming out in 2002 and centered around internet technology it’s hard to take the piece that seriously.  For those old enough it could be a trip down memory lane of how websites used to look and operate and how pictures used to represent and talk about computers and stuff.  So with that and camcorders playing another large role the movie’s aged very poorly.

(Alright I’m moving out of bullet points now)

*Spoilers for the rest of this but the movie’s not very good and the final reveal is kinda peculiar* The enormous overarching issue with the film is it’s a shameless knock off of The Ring (it’s sort of a Nightmare on Elm Street rip off too but I’ll get to that).  Here’s a rundown of the similarities but fair warning that this will also be spoilers for The Ring.

(Going back to bullet points (sorry for this review being a bit of a mess))

·         Girl dies and uses then modern technology to enact her revenge.

·         If you log on to the website (feardotcom.com) you’re cursed.

·         Visitors to the website have visions of events related to the girl’s death that are also clues to uncovering who this person is and where you can find her.

·         After visiting the website you have 48 hours to live which parallels how long the girl was tortured for before she died.

·         A man, Mike (Stephen Dorff), and a woman, Terry (Natascha McElhone (The Truman Show)), team up to find a cure for the curse.

·         The girl’s corpse is found by Terry at the bottom of a pool of waste water.

·         Fake out ending where Mike and Terry think that finding the girl’s corpse will halt the curse but it doesn’t.

·         A discredited doctor was behind the girl’s murder.

·         The girl emerges from the computer screen during the finale.

Holy shit!  And the American remake of The Ring came out just two months later!  I mean come on.

The part about this having Nightmare on Elm Street qualities are Mike and Terry experience visions that aren’t real like seeing a little girl in an all white dress similar to the jump rope girls, Terry gets trapped in a demonic boiler room at one point and it’s indicated that some of the victims think they’re dying from their worst fears like insects or drowning but in reality they’re not.  At first I thought this was the concept they were going with, people killed by their worst fear, which is sorta neat but nope.

Admittedly this is a fascinating film to analyze because of how blatant its influences are.  The mashup of ideas could’ve worked better if they didn’t simply copy and paste so damn much (see the computer pun I snuck in there?).  The Se7en and Nightmare aspects are probably done well enough where they can get away with it but The Ring concept is too unique to lift completely intact so that really doesn’t come off too good.

I might recommend this strictly as a case study.  If you’re into breaking shit down, especially horror shit, it could be worth your while from an academic standpoint.