FEARDOTCOM [2002]

 I'M A FAN OF WILLIAM MALONE'S "HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL" REMAKE. 

It's a lot of fun and super entertaining.  Many people hate it but there is a good size group of us who like it.  FEARDOTCOM, however, is pretty much universally shat upon from a great height.  It's nowhere near as bad as many people insist; however, it's not in any way good either.  I think the major problem I had with it is that it's plain dull; unlike HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL which was like the roller coaster which opens the film.  Apparently, there was a lot of "studio interference" with FEARDOTCOM and I'm sure that's the truth owing to the final product being an unfocused, convoluted mishmash which doesn't make a lot of sense.  Another big thing I noticed is that it reminded me of a lot of other films; almost all of them better.  FEARDOTCOM has a strong whiff of RINGU about it:  a website that kills you 48 hours after you see it.  That's not really an original idea since practically everybody makes that comparison.  Other movies which are strongly echoed in FEARDOTCOM are PULSE (the online aspect) and FLATLINERS (the hallucinatory "scary" fear scenes) are just two examples.  There are also neo-noir touches:  the scene in the elevator with a woman's lipstick screams out Sean Young.  If the studio interference was indeed so insistent than I'm inclined to let William Malone off the hook for this one. 

Even though the whole premise of the film isn't that original, a lot could've been done with it and it would've been nice to see what an unhindered director might've made of the whole thing.  Instead, what we have it a rather typical example of early-noughties horror which becomes a snooze-fest of missed opportunities.  Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone are adequate but don't have enough screen presence to liven things up.  The cast is peppered with superb character actors in secondary roles -- I would've much preferred a movie focusing on THEM -- the majesty of Jeffrey Combs, Udo Kier, Nigel Terry and Michael Sarazin (all favourites of mine) kept me from giving up the ghost.  The screenwriters also provided some horror easter eggs (a la THE HOWLING) by naming characters and place names after famous horror icons:  Rea's character is named Pratt (William Henry Pratt aka Boris Karloff), Kier's character is Polidori (Dr. John Polidori, author of "THE VAMPIRE"), a character is named Barlow (a la Stephen King's SALEM'S LOT), there is a Poelzig nuclear power plant (Karloff's character in THE BLACK CAT which itself is named after Hans Poelzig, art director of DER GOLEM), etc. etc.  There is also one thing which I noticed immediately that I've never seen anyone mention before:  the voice/accent used by Stephen Rea as the devilish Doctor Alistair Pratt is identical to the voice Heath Ledger used for the Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT 6 years later.  Heath exaggerated it a little but yeah, it's the same voice.  Could Ledger have seen this film by chance and, consciously or unconsciously, pulled the voice from his memory when voicing the Joker????  I wonder . . . .