Monday, May 24, 2010

Fear Dot Com (2002)

I've seen this movie once before, and I was pretty sure that it was super-lame, but I decided to give it another chance for the sake of a review.  This movie is kind of a ripoff of Ringu/The Ring only with a website instead of a video.  The premise is that you go to this website to watch people get killed, and after you see it, you die within 48 hours.  Strangely enough, your death is caused by your worst fear.  The people in this movie have odd fears -- one guy dies in a car crash, one person drowns in the bath, one person is hit by a subway. and one person is seemingly scared to death by cockroaches.  This other person dies in a jail cell and I'm not sure if that's their worst fear, or if that's how they had to die because they were stuck there.  Anyway, I digress.

Stephen Dorff is Mike Reilly, a burnt out NYC detective who is distressed because a previous case he worked on, "The Doctor" has not been solved.  But now there's a new case to be cracked.  People are dying randomly in NYC and being found looking super-scared and with bloody eyes.  Those in charge immediately think it's a virus and bring in Terry from the Department of Health (Natascha McElhone).  But tests and autopsies show that it's not a virus at all and something else is afoot.

You would think it would be time for the DOH to be taken off the case since it's not a virus, but not in this movie.  Terry and Mike band together to solve the mystery.  As it turns out, the victims all have one thing in common -- they've all visited the feardotcom website prior to death.  Additionally, there appears to be some sort of little girl bouncing a ball involved in this nonsense. 

Blah blah blah Doctor's former victim blah blah blah torture chamber.  If this movie said "Want to Play?" a la Chucky one more time, I was probably going to lose it.  And in the end, I still couldn't figure out how the website was doing what it was doing.  This movie somehow got two watches from me, but gets the same verdict.  Skip it.
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