FearDotCom

Monday, March 17, 2003

This loathsome exercise combines the worst aspects of nu-metal horror and mid-budget cop thriller, and if it's redundant to say "not in a good way," then certainly not in a casual way. It seems to have actively sought out the stupidest parts of each genre in an institutional gray-brown mess featuring the least inventive bad guy/s in memory, and possibly the most tenuous explanation of evil in the history of horror film.

Stephen Dorff is as bad as he was in Blade; Stephen Rea plays it like he's working on a drunken impression of Geoffrey Rush at his campiest - he must have prepared by watching director William Malone's last outing, House on Haunted Hill. To say that a performance falls far short of Geoffrey Rush in House on Haunted Hill, well, it's saying a fair bit.

Why combine these aspects of horror and cop thriller? No one but Se7en has ever really pulled it off, and so many individual horror and cop flicks of recent years have fallen prey to the most embarrassing conventions of genre theory that I can't imagine willingly embracing probably the second-worst mistake of crime thriller and the #1 pitfall of horror.

Fear.com shapes deeply its Ringian ancestry, and in the end I hate to invoke the name of that film, lest folks who enjoyed The Ring be inclined to seek out f.c for its Ringlike qualities, but steer clear; better to see a dozen semi-flawed straight remakes (see The Ring, 2002) than one sodden bit of thievery stretched on the decaying skeleton of the worst genre cliches.

Rating: F-

Reviewed by Matthew Abrams
Contents
The Hills Have Eyes 2

Hostel Part II

Six Degrees

Shark

Jericho

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Justice

The Hills Have Eyes

Love Monkey

Out of Practice

Head Cases

Crunchwrap Supreme

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Batman Begins

Garden State

Hero

13 Going On 30

LAX

Starman

quirkyalone.net

Kill Bill, Vol. 2

Line of Fire

We Shall All Be Healed

Happy Family

Arrested Development

Love Actually

A Minute with Stan Hooper

Tarzan

Karen Sisco

Stop All the World Now

Cold Case

Skin

10-8

Joan of Arcadia

Eve

Luis

Lost In Translation

House of 1000 Corpses

Bubba Ho-Tep

Darkness Falls

Pirates of the Caribbean

The Amazing Race

Treasure Island

FearDotCom

Adaptation

To Hit Armor Class Zero

Without A Trace

8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter

Life With Bonnie

JalapeƱo Cheeseburger

The Mothman Prophecies

Happy Campers

The Man Who Wasn't There

Kiss of the Dragon

Josie & the Pussycats

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Dr. Pepper

Know By Heart

Waking Life

L.I.E.

Thirteen Ghosts

Earthlink presents Chang and Eng

New York and Country Bar

Change

Motivation and Water Tower Grammar

Crossing Philly

Makeout Club

Undeclared

The Gap

The Abolition of Work

3000 Miles to Graceland

Kolobos

Duets

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Diesel Sweeties

The Cold Six Thousand

The Grilled Stuft Burrito (Rebuttal)

60 Second Wipeout

The Patriot

Grilled Stuft Burrito

Cowgirls

Crystalline

Frankenfinger E.P.

One Force Down

Shake

Both Our Secrets

Happy Birthday Captain Columbus!

Fight Club

Whatever It Takes

Committed

That Skinny Motherfucker with the High Voice?

Joe Dirt

The Veggie Whopper

Taco Bell Nachos

Palmetto

Godzilla vs. Monster Zero

The Terror of Mechagodzilla

To The Center

Infiniti+Infiniti

American Psycho

The Del Shredder

What Lies Beneath

The Cheesy Gordita Crunch

Bring It On

Chill Factor

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars

Bad Company

The Blair Witch Project

Hyacinths and Thistles

Lake of Dracula

We'll Have a Time

Home Depot

Snow Day

The Virgin Suicides