Fear Dot Com (2002)

Review written by: Joshua Taj Bozeman on March 13, 2003 @ 5:30 P.M.CT.

Well folks, this is gonna be a hard one to review...why? Well, mainly because this has to be one of the worst movies ever made. One of the biggest wastes of celluloid in movie history. Some of the worst acting ever...and some of the worst writing in the history of writing. The story about a detective played by Stephen Dorff (whose career must be in the dumps to make garbage like this) is quite confusing and quite boring. The lead actress, a department of health worker, who for some unknown reason works a murder case with the good detective (we all know the doh workers constantly do police work on the side, asking questions, following leads, picking up dead bodies from large bodies of water, etc) is played by Natascha McElhone is by far the worst actress I have ever witnessed. She makes the terrible (but gorgeous) blonde from Law and Order look like an Oscar contender! I watched her in some scenes, and I have to keep asking myself, HOW did she ever become an actress? How did she ever get hired for a big movie? Her acting is so fake, it's totally laughable...and some of the stuff she does in the movie makes no sense. As I said, she says she works for the dept. of health, yet she is with the detective day and night on this murder case...she questions people...she does what an officer would do. This guy has a partner who we see a couple of times, but he seems to be AWOL for most of the film. Dorff's character seems to be tracking some killer who calls himself the doctor, and there is some confusing stuff with a live website where he kills people live...but he never uses the same URL twice, so they can't find him. Yea, THAT makes sense! Uh huh...

We get to the website part....people mysteriosly die exactly 48 hrs after going to this website that seems to be run by the doctor? I don't even know...the story made little sense. There's something about one of the doctor's victims...who played with a white ball when she was young, so we keep seeing some phantom ghost girl playing with a white ball...bouncing it all over the place. Don't even ask me what this movie is about, because, frankly, I have no idea. (I love the commas, by the way.) Something about this victim wanting revenge on the killer doctor, so she kills people because they're guilty of going to the site...I THINK. Well, needless to say, again...well, I'll say it- the story was terrible. Whoever wrote this should be banished to a remote island where he or she can never write a horrible screenplay again.

This is in the horror genre, but the only scary part is when the dead body moves and you think it's alive...other than that, most of the movie is made of up bad editing...it seems like they just threw a bunch of scenes together in random order...quick flashes of weird looking stuff on this fear dot com website, and bad acting by Dorff and crew.

This isn't even B movie material...because you can't even laugh at it. These filmmakers were clearly trying to make decent movie...well, a decent movie in their mind- the director seems to think his idea for the film is genius. It's not.

Stay as far away from this movie as you can. I prayed for the end to come, and that's usually a bad sign. The scariest thing about fear dot com is that some studio actually shelled out millions to make it.

0/10