Thirty minutes: the length of time it takes to deliver a pizza, or the running time, with commercials, of an average television show. Not to mention the amount of time that any sane human being can tolerate "feardotcom" before walking out on it.
This movie is one sick puppy. "feardotcom" was straight up vile and I can't think of a single thing to say in its defense. I love a good horror movie -- this was just pedantic, clumsy, heavy-handed, gratuitous, nasty and misguided shock-splatter slop. It goes nowhere, and it goes slowly and viciously.
The plot, largely an excuse for a series of torture sequences and "Omen"-style creative deaths, highlights a rash of people dying or going crazy without any evident cause. At first, Detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) and disease specialist Terry Houston (Natasha McElhone) think it's an outbreak of some sort, but when they discover it's not viral, they scramble to find a common link among the victims.
It's not revealing much to say that the movie's official Web site is connected to this string of bizarre and seemingly inexplicable deaths. And how clever is this: Web address is (you guessed it) feardotcom.com. Are you scared yet?
The two lead actors seem to be phoning in their roles from somewhere in the Antarctic. Dorff and McElhone are barely going through the motions, and the budding romantic subplot between the two is enough to make anyone scream. It wasn't believable for a second.
There are a few cool supporting performances that almost redeem some parts of the movie. The "Re-Animator" himself, Jeffrey Combs, plays a doughnut-munching homicide cop.
Udo Kier has a cameo at the beginning, even if he dies and doesn't do much else. Stephen Rea is a tremendously talented actor, and though he seems to be trying hard here, he's simply dreary, ugly and cold as the psycho killer.
Director Bill Malone can do much better -- his '80s "Alien" rip-off films and even his "House on Haunted Hill" remake had their moments and were pretty fun overall. But he crashes and burns here.
The script has a reasonably compelling premise (though it steals pretty blatantly from "Stir of Echoes," "Strangeland" and "Thesis"), but the film focuses entirely too hard on the darkest, ugliest aspects of it, with little to no light in sight.
It also engages repeatedly in the cliched horror movie practice of introducing characters in one scene and then doing a long drawn-out sequence leading up to their gruesome death.
Maybe moviemakers don't realize this, but it's hard to work up any suspense, fear or sympathy for the death of a totally miscellaneous, one-dimensional character, about whom we know nothing. Of course, it reveals who these people are as it goes along and some of the plot's secrets are semi-intriguing, but that doesn't change the fact that the viewer feels left out in the cold for over half the film's running time.
Even if one doesn't always see what's going on, it's ridiculously obvious where things are going. As is usual in dumb horror movies, the characters figure out what's happening about an hour later than the audience.
"Feardotcom" rubs the viewer's nose in its nastiness -- it seems to exist solely to give the murders center stage, while cops run around chasing their tails.
It's loaded with totally gratuitous nudity as well. There's a sequence where the cops arrive at a crime scene only to find a naked dead German woman in a bathtub.
The movie presents about half a dozen shots of her post-mortem breasts, usually in close-up. The moviemakers seem to think we'll forget the woman has mammary glands, and therefore we need constant reminders of this fact.
Any attempts that "feardotcom" makes at social commentary fall pretty flat as well, considering they come largely in the form of overwrought monologues by the torture killer, Pratt.
For a horror movie promulgating all sorts of deaths, "feardotcom" can't even manage to generate that terror. There are a couple of dead-tired gags involving people or ghosts sneaking up on unsuspecting persons, and giving them a shock that measures about a 1.5 on the Richter scale of fear.
Frankly, the most frightening part of my movie-going experience was a preview for an upcoming movie with Vin Diesel in a speaking part.
When the prospect of another lunk-headed action film with a flavor-of-the-week, no-talent star is more frightening than the horror movie that follows, it's got some serious problems.
There's only one way to describe this mess: "crapdotcom"
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