Feardotcom (2002)

Film Title: Feardotcom
Released: August 30, 2002
Directed by: William Malone
Written by: Josephine Coyle based on a story by Moshe Diamant
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone & Stephen Rea

Plot: A police detective teams up with a Department of Health researcher to discover the reason behind a rash of deaths and they discover a website is at the center of the mystery.

IMDb: 3.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 3/100
My Score: 1.5/5

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Feardotcom is director William Malone's fourth feature film and his first since his version of House on Haunted Hill in 1999. Stephen Dorff is an NYPD detective investigating a series of mysterious deaths. He crosses paths with Natascha McElhone, a Department of Health investigator, and the two team up to get to the bottom of things. During their investigation, they realize that the only connection between the victims is that they all have damaged computers. Dorff contacts Amelia Curtis, a forensic computer analyst and friend, to see what she can retrieve from the hard drives. She discovers that all the victims visited a website called Feardotcom.com, where voyeurs can watch a serial killer named the Doctor (Stephen Rea) torture and murder his victims. Rea is the "one that got away" for Dorff, a skeleton in his closet, as he puts it. They also figure out that everyone who logs onto the site dies 48 hours after they do so of what seems to be their greatest fears (drowning, car crash, etc). Dorff decides that the only way to figure everything out is to log onto the site himself. Once he does, he finds out that it is actually the ghost of Rea's first victim (German actress Gesine Cukrowski) that is punishing everyone who logs onto the site for wanting to watch the death and suffering of others. Cukrowski was a hemophiliac in life, deathly afraid of any sharp objects, and Rea dissected her alive, thus the reason she uses her victim's greatest fears as tools to kill them. 48 hours is how long she was tortured before she died. Basically what it all boils down to is that Dorff and McElhone have to have to stop Rea in order for the ghost to stop her killing spree. And how do they do that? By logging onto the site once they find him, releasing the ghost and enabling her to exact her revenge. This marriage of serial killer thriller and ghost story horror probably would have been better served had the creative team stuck with one trope or the other. As it is, it comes across as the inbred bastard child of Seven and The Ring (the original Japanese version since Gore Verbinksi's American remake wasn't released until a month and a half after Feardotcom came out). Some inventive visuals can't save this one from the abysmal script, terrible plot and crappy performances. Nigel Terry, Michael Sarrazin, and personal favorites Jeffrey Combs and Udo Kier co-star. Universally panned by critics upon release, it did win the Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film award at Fantafestival in 2003. On the other hand, it also won the Worst Film award at both the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards and the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards the same year.