FeardotCom [William Malone, 20002]:
I have a real soft spot for director William Malone's earlier remake of House on Haunted Hill (1999) and that first run of films produced by Dark Castle Entertainment; the company set-up by producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis and Gilbert Adler to release horror films with a distinctly old-fashioned flavor and lots of ornate style. Later films from the same company, such as Thirteen Ghosts (2001), Ghost Ship (2002) and House of Wax (2005), have a lot of nostalgic value attached to them for me, and Malone's subsequent film, this derided J-horror knock off, hits a lot of those same notes. This was a period when horror cinema was largely dismissed by critics, with few reviewers willing to look beyond the sensationalist violence and generic plots of these films to offer much in the way of serious analysis. Twenty years later and horror movies are now "elevated," with even the schlockiest of stuff being approached as if it's carrying some deep and rich social commentary.
FeardotCom certainly isn't rich in social commentary, but for me it does a lot of things that elevate it above it's mostly dismal reputation. Essentially both a gloomy serial killer procedural in the spirit of the superior Seven (1995) by David Fincher and a revenge tale about a haunted website (with more than a few hints to similarly better films like Ring (1998) and Pulse (2001) respectively), FeardotCom is a film that survives on the strength of aesthetics. The retro-futurist production design by Jérôme Latour and noir-ish cinematography by Christian Sebaldt give the film a look of authentic expressionism, which more than compensates for some of the ludicrous plotting and derivative psycho-shlock. The surprisingly talented cast includes Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone as the main protagonists investigating these strange deaths and their links to the titular website, while the often scenery-chewing support comes from Stephen Rea as a mad doctor, with Nigel Terry, Amelia Curtis, Jeffrey Combs and Udo Kier all appearing in extended cameos.
