A carnival of technology

This movie sucked.

Want to see a really killer website? It’s the last site you’ll ever see.

Rated R for violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language.
Given a final score of 9 with an influence density of 3.89 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring some people playing incredibly unmemorable characters.

Viewed 2005-06-09 by David, David, Susi, and Mike.

Horror movies are a bit of a peculiar genre. Most movies attempt to evoke some sort of emotional response, whether that response is sadness, laughter, or fear, but fear seems to be the most difficult of these. You only need to tell a joke to get an audience to laugh, or convince them to care about the characters to make them cry, but to make them truly scared you need to pull the audience fully into the world of the movie. The thrill of the events on the screen is lost if the viewer is not convinced on some level that those events are truly happening before his eyes. People enjoy a good scare, though, so movie producers, responding to the public’s call, have left no shortage of horror movies for both the cinema and television. As a result, many fans of this genre find that low expectations are the best route, instead enjoying the movies for the often formulaic structure, for the poor acting, for the nonsensical plot, and, if the viewer is lucky, for an occasional thrill. The Bottom 100 list has its share of horror movies, and FearDotCom is the first.

I never saw the The Ring, but, since I wasn’t living under a rock in 2002, I’m familiar with at least it’s basic outline: there’s a video tape that, if you watch it, ensures that you will die in a week, and some creepy dead girl is involved. FearDotCom was released first, yet, even though I can’t find the dates for when either movie was originally announced, FearDotCom feels like the ripoff. Instead of a video on an outdated medium that kills you in seven days, somehow involving some dead girl, FearDotCom has a website that kills you in two days, somehow involving some dead woman. I assume the website was supposed to be very hip, since it didn’t look like a website that anyone would be able to actually use: all the shots of the horribly named feardotcom.com had a full-screen animation with a low framerate, and the web browser’s interface involved typing complete sentences, oddly reminiscent of an Infocom text adventure. Whether this website was an attempt to one-up the VHS of The Ring is irrelevant, though; the point is that there’s a website, and, if you visit it, you die.

Beyond those core details I can’t say that I really knew what was going on. There was some guy who I guess was a surgeon running a snuff film website that was maybe different from feardotcomdotcom. There was some creepy ghost girl with a ball that I think was the same as the woman on the killer website. There wasn’t a whole lot of light. I think people were supposed to die of their worst fears, which means that the smoker’s worst fear was cigarettes, and the lead detective character had some issues with hookers and homeless people.

I was somewhat hoping for a Hamlet ending, since that would have at least created an interesting event for a bunch of characters I didn’t care at all about. Checking IMdb to see if the aforementioned lead detective has a name I was supposed to remember (he doesn’t), I noticed that the featured trivia is that one of the characters, Polidori, is named after the guy who wrote The Vampyre, the first English vampire story, written at the same rainy Genevan villa that brought you part of Byron’s “Mazeppa” and the more memorable Frankenstein. I have no idea what significance there is in naming a character after a Victorian physician to idle rich. Also, the name alone was not nearly enough to figure out just which character they were talking about. The description of “doctor” didn’t help, since the only doctors I remember were women and the one guy they called “The Doctor,” who IMdb says was not named Polidori. Even knowing what the actor looks like, I had to use google to find out that it was the guy who gets hit by a train in the beginning. There were no vampires in the movie.