Every so often a film will come along that requires a fair deal of sacrifice. You have to sacrifice your personal code of what you come to call of perfection and you must view the world through your eyes and not your mind. Feardotcom is one of those films. In a grey world, with a blue atmosphere and a black existence, lies a man, bleeding from the eyes from some sort of hemerage, dead, because of his plagued visions of a little blonde girl with a white ball. The case is brought forward to a detective who fears germs and disease and one who works with them at the Department of Health. As they search for the answers of why so many people are being found dead, bleeding from the eyes they stumble upon a website entitled feardotcom.com. As more research is made available they are able to link the death of the victim to occurring exactly forty-eight hours after logging on to the site. Then comes the obligatory promise to not visit that site at any cost but instantly break it as soon as the others back is turned. There are three functioning parties within the parameters of this film. There are the good guys. The bad guy, a medical reject that is known only as The Doctor. This is a man who believes that death is an art and therefore should be as graphic as possible. He tortures his victims until they beg to die and then he kills them, making him an artist instead of a murderer. The last formation in this morbid puzzle is a blonde dominatrix, a pale little girl with a white ball and a rotting corpse at the bottom of a flooded reservoir. She is a neutron force that keeps the cell process moving in a forward fashion. She is neither good nor evil. She kills but does so in hopes of redemption. A person searching for something but hasn't found the right key to unlock her treasure chest of ghastly bliss. The problem here is that neither the Doctor nor does the ghost have any connecting factors. First the cops search for the Doctor, then they becomes side tracked by the site that is killing people and search for the ghost and forget about the Doctor, until they finally set the ghost aside and go back to searching for the doctor. This film is an incoherent mess that possesses no bonding materials to make its story move at one pace and stick to one thing at a time. It is like a huge black whole where things come out of and get sucked back in as they feel. Scenes end short with no others to vouch for them. People are found dead and forgotten about and detectives find things without having to search for them, only to have nothing in which to apply them to in the future. But we must take into consideration that this is one of the best boring films I have ever seen. It's a film that makes promises to its viewer and then breaks them because it can. It is more of an experience than a film itself. It is a group of scenes that would make David Lynch bow his head in honours but would never be dumb enough to form a movie around. It is a cyber kinetic game that plays with its viewer's emotions. Why do you look at car crashes even though you know you don't want to see what could have happened to the victim? It is because people want to see something that they shouldn't. It's a voyeuristic tendency that people have that could push oneself to the edge of decency and still leave the person hungry for more. This is a film that wants to feed our fetishes with the obscene by being as sick and twisted as possible. We are shown skinned human carcasses, blood spewing reptile like women and live surgery, all broadcast on the Internet. The human body is a network of gears and leavers that read codes that enable life, so why can't computers do the same thing? The Internet is a body of work that previews the future by utilizing the past. Yet this is not a smart film, it ditches the idea of having something to say within the first half an hour. It has no moral code and follows no ingenious rules, it goes wherever it wants, whenever it wants and has no problem in knowing that it is absolutely terrible. You could probably get the same effect of this film from lining up four televisions in a row and playing Seven, Dee Snider's Strangeland, the Cell and House on Haunted Hill all at once. It is one huge mash of colours and feeling that the eyes will love but the brain will loathe. The film was directed by William Malone who knows how to make terrible horror films (House on Haunted Hill) that are like nice, big, juicy, red apples. They look delicious until you bite into it and get a mouthful of a nice plump worm. This is one of the most visually stunning films of the year and one of the most inconsistent all at the same time. This is a film that has so much going for it that that its priorities get lost in the cause and become little of the effect. But although this is a truly brilliant film, it is nothing more than a W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. (what your see is what you get). It suffers in trying to compare but results in little contrast. The visuals have really nothing to do with anything that happens in this film. It's not some deep, emotional burden that uses symbolic structures and astounding breakdowns to amplify the viewer's attention span and make them think. This is a run-of-the-mill detective thriller with a ghost story twist. It has no symbolic substance meaning that if you really wish to see how miraculous this film is you have to watch this film in such a fashion that you will be able to absorb the films good qualities, on mute. William Malone, a man whose fascination with fear allows him to produce the product but rarely radiate it, directed the film. I think it would suit Malone wonderfully to consider becoming a conceptual artist of take up the art of silence film. The film also sees Malone in one of the years most ironic pairing in actor Stephen Dorff (neither seems to read scripts before signing on to films). Dorff is the films greatest asset in that he is the most talented man on screen and he does the best he can to make this film seem like a real detective film. As for Stephen Rea as the Doctor, he falls flat on his face. Rea is one of the most boring and unthreatening villains I have ever seen, clearly this guy called in a favour to get this role. Since this film was released I have seen nothing but negative comments for it, which, in all entirety, it deserves. But in all honesty there is more good about this film than people are willing to realize because they are bogged down by the incepted story and not willing to care about anything else. But for the most part, in the genre of bad films, this one is just about the best.
Review of Feardotcom
