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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 2.35:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • Italian: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • Hungarian: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  Subtitles
    English, Italian, Hebrew, Czech, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Arabic, Portuguese, English - Hearing Impaired, Italian - Hearing Impaired, Turkish, Icelandic, Croatian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hindi, Slovenian, Commentary - English
  Extras
  • 1 Deleted scenes
  • Theatrical trailer - FearDotCom; Thir13en Ghosts; Fright Night
  • Audio commentary - irector & Director Photography
  • Featurette - Visions of Fear
  • Photo gallery
  • Filmographies

FearDotCom

Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 97 mins . MA15+ . PAL

  Feature
Contract

FearDotCom is the spine-tingling story of a flash enabled website that never finishes loading for users on dialup access. An urban legend begins to spread around the Internet via email claiming that if you try to view the site on a 56k modem and click "skip movie" before the intro loads, you die of embarrassment in front of all your friends who have cable.

That's what a film called FearDotCom would be about if it was made by geeks. But this wasn't, so we have to contend with a story about a haunted mysterious website, a psycho who likes to stream murders onto the Internet and a ghost in the machine travelling the wires of the world wide wank looking for revenge and porn-free warez sites.

At least, I think that’s what it’s about.

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See? Now I wouldn't have missed the bowl if the lights were on..

To be honest, it all gets a bit muddy after a while, and the film is bigger on style than content, something the director readily admits to. It doesn't take too long before you begin making comparisons with other films, most obvious being Se7en, with the dark sets and persistent rain. But whereas Se7en successfully combined visual style, an intelligent and coherent storyline and great performances, FearDotCom suffers from OTT reliance on dark visuals for atmosphere, scripting assembled on the loo and performances which are not going to earn the actors any respect. In short, Se7en is good, FearDotComDotNetDotAu is not.

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TURN ON THE LIGHTS OR I"LL BLOW YOUR F*CKING HEAD OFF..If I see it..

Not helping any is the sheer bloodymindedness of the director and DP in creating a dark, dark, really dark picture. Did I mention it's dark? Really dark. How dark? Very dark. If I can’t think of other words to use instead of repeating ‘dark’ over and over, you just know that this film is going to be pretty damn dark. I couldn't even be bothered getting out my electronic Thesaurus to look up alternatives, because nothing describes how dark the picture is better than the word ‘dark’.

And besides dark, it’s an unpleasant little flick as well. Filled with what they think are shocking images and noisy flashbacks or hallucinations, I’m sure they’re all very satisfied with what they think is a scary and nightmarish film, but I found it dark and annoying and pointless and devoid of reason and not very entertaining at all thank you very much, Captain.

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I think this was a good bit, but it was a bit too dark to tell for sure.

As for the whole “haunted-site-let’s-steal-the-idea-from-Ring concept”, well, they should be ashamed of themselves. Someone looks at the website, 48 hours later they imagine weird shit happening to them and then they die. If the story was well written and the characters likable I’d care about these people and I’d be upset by this. “Don’t look at the website, please! You’ll die!” I’d scream at them. But I don’t care about them at all. Instead, I scream “Load up www.feardotcom.com in Internet Explorer and die you stupid bastards! I hate you all!” They can’t die soon enough. I look at my watch, damn - still 90 minutes to go! Can’t someone just go around and set www.feardotcom.com as the homepage on everyone’s browser or send out an email with a link to the site telling them that it contains some funny Flash games? Everyone would be dead in ten minutes and I could go to bed and sleep off the wine I had for dinner.

And can someone please tell scriptwriters not to write anymore bullshit technical dialogue if they don’t understand it? Fair enough I allow that they need to make things sound interesting and high tech for the less computer literate in the audience who don’t know the difference between Windows and, say, tuna salad, but there’s only so much I can stand of “If we ping his email with an artificial intelligence virus then we can set it to self-destruct when he logs on to his website, otherwise his ISP will lock us out from download access with an encrypted password! If that happens, we’ll never be able to find a site we can download free porn from!” I BEG YOU, PLEASE STOP! The people in the audience who watch this film because they saw the word ‘Com’ in the title are pissing themselves laughing right now.

Finally, on top of all this, one thing really bugs me. This film is called FearDotCom, because the website in it is called FearDotCom, so if you were to type that into a browser, you would enter www.fear.com, right? So why do all the characters type in www.feardotcom.com? Wouldn’t that mean that the film should really be called FearDotComDotCom? I’m taking off two points just for that.

  Video
Contract

Now, you absolutely must make sure you watch this film at night with the lights out. Not because it's scary - it’s not - but because the picture is so dark for nearly the entire duration that any reflection on your screen or anything which restricts your display device will make this film nearly impossible to watch. If you can control your environment, then the picture will be reasonably enjoyable, if not extremely oppressive and slightly maddening to view. That's because even when viewed under ideal circumstances the darkness is just too much and doesn't reveal much detail anyway. It's also devoid of really natural looking colours, soaked with cold blues and greys with stark whites contrasting against the heavy blacks, often making for a monochromatic picture that's too stylised for its own good. The commentary reveals that they were trying to be a little more experimental with their shooting, but that often seems to translate into just shooting without artificial lights. In some scenes it gets ridiculous, such as during an autopsy being performed in the dark, and others too numerous to mention.

  Audio
Contract

Yet, I have to give them points for trying to create an immersive environment with the sound design, regardless of how cliché-ridden it can be. The surrounds are full of continual thunder and rainfall, and are also used to enhance the voices and effects in the website scenes, even if it is spatially wrong most of the time. In fact, the rears are active in some capacity nearly the whole time. On the more mundane side of things, vocally things are pretty spot on, not that the dialogue actually plays a great big part, because it’s so badly written and there is so little of it. On the whole, the total effect is promising and probably the highlight of a film otherwise devoid of highlights.

  Extras
Contract

Commentary - Director & Director of Photography
Well, listening to this you hear that they thought they'd made the darkest film ever shot, and they're probably not far wrong, good or bad. Not the most interesting comm going, it can be dull going, but there’s just enough of interest that someone will find it interesting, in a “I have no life” kind of way.

Featurette - Visions of Fear (05:03)
Your typical featurette which is too short to offer up anything worthy, but nonetheless tries to cover as much ground as is possible with just a soundbite to sum up each topic. It's funny watching Dorff and McElhone try to verbalise their understanding of the film's concept and technology, for they have no clue.

Deleted Scene - The Mushroom Factory (with director's intro) (04:59)
Turfed out because they thought it didn’t fit in with the rest of the film, this is the single deleted scene on the DVD, but I'd say that it was cut because it was redundant, not that it didn't fit in with the feel of the rest of the film.

Image Gallery - 20 images

Filmographies
Stephen Rea, Stephen Dorff & Natascha McElhone.

Trailers
FearDotCom, Thir13en Ghosts and that good old classic Fright Night. What a charming little collection of cheerful trailers they've put together to warm the cockles of our hearts.

  Overall  
Contract

FearDotCom is a dud, simple as that. It tries to use the ever-trendy technology hook to give it an edge over far superior similarly styled thrillers, but the concept is totally wasted here. Cinematically this came and went before you could say “Sounds like a load of sh…” and it’s not too hard to see why. Give this a miss.


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      And I quote...
    "A competent DVD release of a less than competent film. Some lights, a proper story, a better title, better actors and a different director might have saved it."
    - Vince Carrozza
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