Fear dot com is not a pleasure to watch, nor is it a very good movie; but it delivers chills down your spine when presenting its best material. There is not one frame where torture, or dialogue explaining torture, is not present. Though the torture is what makes you scared, and the film wouldn’t be as good without it. The absent-mindedness of the story is infallible in sending fear to viewers’ brains; shocking them while keeping its indigenous wit. The acting is poor, the screenplay is horrible, but the intrepid flare that the scares are able to maintain is wonderful. The whole thing has potential, but I will never be able to recommend it; the obvious flaws are irreversible because of the mediocre script and casting.

     The film itself is about a website that can eventually kill you. On the page you see murderous torture take place that will eventually drive its viewers insane. If that’s not enough, there is a woman on it that constantly taunts you to “come and play.” The word “play” is used as a synonym of the word “kill”; and the phrase “come and play” is asking the viewers of the site if they want to be killed. The material eventually drives people insane, creating a diversion in their minds; their subconscious tells them that they want to die. Fear dot com explains death like it’s some sort of relief for the suffering the world causes. This scheme has been used a thousand times before in movies, though the internet has never been incorporated into the premise.

     There are two agents working on the case that comes up, caused by the unexplainable deaths of the many viewers of the website that wanted to play a little too much. When the agents find that the trigger of all of this pandemonium is the “fear site”, they hire a woman to restore an old computer hard-drive that the site was originally created on. She must transfer all of the recoverable files to her own for investigational purposes. Once she boots the computer with the newly added files on it up; she is immediately sucked into the fear sites wrath and is set to die forty-eight hours later. As the story continues and fate takes its play, the two agents find her dead and can’t resist the urge to look at “feardotcom.com” themselves, even though they know the consequence. Will they die in the end? Only god knows. You can take mischievous ride of Fear dot com, but if you would like to be spared from this marginally amusing creation; e-mail me and I’ll tell you if you just if you have to know.

     One of the more redeeming features in of this flick was the interesting film editing, done by Alan Strachan. Their selection in cuts to use (despite the directors priority choice) was done to a unique and catchy scale, and was one of the more visually appealing aspects of the film. I especially enjoyed the scenes with various 2 second clips, violently cut, that mesh together with a deviously creative original score. When you watch them you feel like you’re in the twilight zone (though they are fun to watch because of their interestingly bizarre feel). These surprisingly made the movie more haunting, it’s amazing how big of an impact that the people off-screen can make on a film.

     I can’t believe that I even was remotely entertained by such an on-screen disaster. This movie is similar to Resident Evil and xXx; you’ll enjoy it if you just turn of your brain and except what they have to say. Though extremely grisly and torturous the vile, bloody, and gross images didn’t seem to bother me much because they were well acted (unlike the rest of the picture). Fear dot com is worth a look when it comes onto HBO or Showtime, but other than that; I can’t say much for it at all.

-Danny, Bucket Reviews