| FeardotCom | |
|---|---|
Film poster |
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| Directed by | William Malone |
| Produced by | Limor Diamant Moshe Diamant Jean-Marc Félio |
| Written by | Moshe Diamant Josephine Coyle |
| Starring | Stephen Dorff Natascha McElhone Stephen Rea |
| Music by | Nicholas Pike |
| Cinematography | Christian Sebaldt |
| Editing by | Alan Strachan |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Sony Pictures Releasing (non-USA) |
| Release date(s) | August 30, 2002 |
| Running time | 101 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom Germany Luxembourg United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $40,000,000[1] |
| Box office | $18,902,015[1] |
FeardotCom is a 2002 horror film, directed by William Malone and stars Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone and Stephen Rea.
Contents |
Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) is an NYPD detective who is called to the scene of a mysterious death in the subway system. The victim, Polidori (Udo Kier), exhibits bleeding from his eyes and other orifices and, by the frozen look on his face, appears to have been scared to death.
Department of Health researcher Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone) is intrigued by the find as well, particularly when several more victims show up with identical symptoms.
When a contagious virus is ruled out, the two team up to discover what might be killing these people. After some digging for clues, they end up sending the victims' computer hard drives to forensic specialist Denise Stone (Amelia Curtis).
Denise ends up discovering that they had visited a website called Feardotcom which depicts voyeuristic torture murder. Upon looking at the site herself, Denise is subjected to various sights and sounds of torture that eventually drive her crazy and result in her falling to her death from her apartment window.
Mike feels guilty, thinking that he should have never gotten Denise involved in the case. Terry figures out that people who visit the website end up dying within 48 hours, apparently from what they feared most in their lives. Despite such dangerous knowledge, both she and Mike end up visiting the site in order to figure out what is happening.
As they begin to experience paranoia and hallucinations (like the deceased), including that of a young girl and her inflatable ball, they race against time to figure out if any of it has any connection to an extremely vicious serial killer, Alistair "The Doctor" Pratt (Stephen Rea), who's been eluding Mike for years.
It is revealed that Feardotcom is, in fact, a ghost site made by one of Pratt's first victims, who is seeking revenge because people watched her being tortured and murdered. She was tortured by Pratt for 48 hours before she begged him to kill her, which explains why the victims have 48 hours to live. Mike and Terry track down Pratt and release the spirit of the murdered girl from the website, which kills Pratt. However, Mike is also killed.
The ending scene shows Terry lying in her bed with her cat, staring at the ceiling.
It won the "Worst Film" at the 2003 Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards and "Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Silver" at 2003 Fantafestival.
It was nominated for "Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Gold" at the 2004 Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival and "Best Film" at the 2002 Catalonian International Film Festival.
The film was criticized for its lack of originality, specifically, the plot seems to be too derivative of Ring, even though Feardotcom came out two months before the American version of The Ring. The premise is also very similar to that of Japanese film Kairo, released in 2001, and David Cronenberg's Videodrome. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 3%.[2] Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert defended the film's design and visuals; awarding it only two stars out of four, he nonetheless commented, "Strange, how good 'feardotcom' is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see." [3]
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