FeardotCom
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FeardotCom is a 2002 horror film directed by William Malone and stars Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone and Stephen Rea. The plot details with an N.Y.P.D. police officer looking into a series of deaths that are apparently connected to a disturbing website.
Filming was done in Luxembourg and Montreal, the film was released in mid-2002.
Plot
When four bodies are discovered among the industrial decay and urban grime of New York City, brash young detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) teams with ambitious Department of Health researcher Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone) to uncover the cause behind their violent and inexplicable deaths. The only common factor shared by the victims? Each died exactly 48 hours after logging on to feardot.com.
Why It Gets a 500 Internal Server Error
- The film has little-to-no plot as it's basically about a young detective knowing how a website kills people in two days.
- It's boring and not scary at all, despite it being a horror film.
- There are countless plot holes.
- An idea for a death website is very lame. What's more, it's also a blatant rip-off of the killer videotape in The Ring, though in fairness, this film was released before the American remake of The Ring.
- Poor characters. The two lead characters are generic and uninteresting, and we find out almost nothing about why the villain is killing people.
- The name of the site is dull. It was supposed to be "Fear.com", which at least would have made more sense, but the people who owned that site at the time refused to sell it to the producers and threatened to sue them if they used the name without permission, resulting in the site getting the clunky name of "Feardotcom.com".
- Speaking of titles, in Brazil, the film is called Medopontocombr (English: Feardotcombr; .br is the Internet country code top-level domain for Brazil), and the inclusion of the .br domain was entirely unnecessary.
- Weak acting from the cast.
Redeeming Qualities
- The poster, while misleading, is pretty cool and actually looks scary.
- The cinematography is flawless.
Reception
FeardotCom received overwhelmingly negative reviews with praised its cinematography but criticized its script and performances. The film currently holds a 3% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a critic consensus that states "As frustrating as a 404 error, Fear Dot Com is a stylish, incoherent and often nasty mess with few scares". Roger Ebert gave the film a two out of four stars and stated in his review "strange, how good FeardotCom, 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". However, he did give the film some praise for its first twenty minutes. The film currently holds a score of 3.4/10 on IMDb.
Box Office
FeardotCom opened up at #5 on its opening weekend with a domestic gross of $5,710,128. The total domestic gross was $13,258,249. In overseas markets, it made $5,643,766. Overall, the film made $18,902,015 against its $40 million budget, making it a box office bomb.
