Birthe Wolter in FearDotCom (2002)

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Review

If a film this bad, this inept, this boring, this worthless, can get a wide release at the end of the summer season then I'm going to take my video camera into the bathroom and take a dump in living color. Footage of a big fat poopy-brick hitting the toilet water should be able to win a freaking Oscar if this rubbish can get passed off as scary or dramatic or even a film. In a year that has given us some of the worst films of all time, this must surely rank as the worst - and that's a hard thing to do opposite Master of Disguise.

If I had my thesaurus with me I'd start rattling off as many words as I could find that mean 'incompetent' because there really is not a single element of this film that has the slightest bit of competence about it. I'm surprised the director managed to figure out which direction to have the camera pointed. The film deals with a website that sends negative energy out to kill viewers with their greatest fear. It also features many women being tortured, the reason for which I do not know because, frankly, I didn't want to remember this film in any way, shape or form.

Steven Dorff plays a cop who is on the case with a worker from the Department of Health (Natascha McElhone). They think the victims are dying from a disease, only when it's found they aren’t the Department of Health woman doesn't go back to inspecting the kitchens of Chinese restaurants, she stays on the case. Perhaps she wanted to make sure Dorff was washing behind his ears before he prepared a salad – I dunno.

The cop, the usual kind of five o'clock shadow stereotype that looks like he's just got out of rehab seems to have no problem with this, though he has a large problem in figuring out how to use the 'whois' function at Internic, which would tell him who was running the torture site and save us all the trouble of sitting through this utter bollocks.

So what are the problems with this flick? Good God, do I have six hours? First of all it has dialogue so bad that it won’t just make you cringe, it’ll make you prolapse. Dialogue like this, for example, when the Health worker scares the cop by sneaking up behind him:

Cop: "Jesus!"

Woman: "Terry Houston actually. Department of Health."

Oh lordy, that's some humor there. If someone used a line that corny on me, I think I'd slip them an uppercut; male, female or alien. But in this film, that's actually as good as the humor gets. Believability seems to never be of great interest to the writer or director, the actors are not even close to being on cruise control and the propensity for scenes so dark you can barely make them out on the screen isn't a cinematic touch, it's cinematic laziness. Employ a freaking lighting technician, for crying out loud!

Part of the film involves "The Doctor" telling young women they're just right to play the lead of his upcoming film and luring them into his torture room to be cut apart live on the internet. You have to wonder, with material this bad, if McElhone and Dorff fell for the same trick, as this flick will undoubtedly shred any reputations they enjoyed previously.

Former Tales From the Crypt director William Malone helms this mess, having just got off 1999's House on Haunted Hill failure and it's a reasonable assessment that he'll be heading right back to cheesy TV in the not too distant future. Even that is better than he deserves but you’d have to assume that no self-respecting Wendy’s manager would want this hack in their kitchen, so what other option does he have but bad TV?

Malone's main crime here is in believing that we'd all be scared by images of women being tortured. An unwitting remake of the 1976 near-snuff film, Blood Sucking Freaks (the only film to have ever actually made me physically throw up), Feardotcom features almost the same storyline - 'doctor' lures women to be tortured for entertainment value - only at least Freaks didn't hide the fact that it was for torture voyeurs only. This film gussies itself up as a horror film but in reality it's just a horrible film, taking particular delight in making the audience feel disgusted.

There will be an audience for this film and that's a sad statement about society today. It's an even sadder situation that Hollywood has so few quality control checks that a flick that gets its rocks off cutting open women on the camera while it tut-tuts that people could ever be into that kind of thing, actually makes it to wide release. With bankable names in the cast, no less.

Far be it from me to be considered a prude - I was one of only 12 people out of over 100 that managed to sit through the entire running time of a screening of Salo: 120 Days of Sodom a few years ago - and I'm generally down with whatever anyone wants to put on film being available to whoever wants to sit through it but this film should be taken off the shelves. It's consistently bad, boring, unwatchable, ill-conceived, repulsive, ridiculous and just plain crap. I'm not just being dramatic here - I'd honestly rather stab myself in the arm than sit through it again.

Nudity report: Fans of the gratuitous will love the skin on show in FearDotCom, even if the movie in general has all the appeal of an acid-based groin wash. German Gesine Cukrowski, who went topless in Rosa Roth – Verlorenes Leben (hey, don’t look for it on cable, we have the clip in the Skin database), appears as the woman on the ‘fear’ site who asks over and over, “Do you like to watch?’ Statuesque and very hot, she’s a moment of pleasure in 101 minutes of ick. There’s plenty of other nudity, most prominently from Birthe Wolter as a Goth teenage girl who is drowned in the bath when the ‘fear’ strikes her. The footage of her is shown via camcorder footage, so it’s not the clearest but her tight little body is displayed numerous times for our tit-tilation in the process, so here’s hoping we see more of her some time in the future.

Ratings: Ebert: 2/4, IMDB: 3.7/10, OZ: 0.5/5 (half a point for the nudity, no points for anything else)

Box Office: Despite a $7m opening weekend, FearDotCom quickly collapsed to a $13m domestic gross over four weeks.


Written by: OZ