After a string of mysterious deaths involving victims bleeding from their eyes, Detective Reilly (Stephen Dorff  The Gate, Blade) and health Examiner Terry Houston (Natascha Mc Elhorn  Ronin, Solaris) begin to investigate and discover a ring of related symptoms. All the victims have visited a mysterious website fear. com and have all died. After Detective Reilly and Terry view the website, the clock is now running out as they must discover the origin of the website and put an end to the curse before they become the victims. The movie is rather interesting. It kept my attention throughout the entire story to discover the actual source of this freaky website and who this mysterious Shady Lady is. Like that? I kind of made that up myself... anyways, the movie has these freaky sequences that kind of freak me out. I found it hard to turn away.  

The problem with this film is that it's an evident rip-off or to put it nicely, "homage" to the Japanese cult horror film "The Ring". The plot is simple and straight to the point: bad website cursed, bad website kill, people who look at site die, the end. I was very intrigued to watch this, because I am anxiously awaiting "The Ring" and haven't seen it, yet, so I figured this movie would be the next best thing... boy, was I dead wrong, dead, dead wrong. First off, the movie is so grim and gloomy, it's rather depressing. Better movies like "Dark City" and "The Crow" have been able to pull off the dark and noir feeling without being depressing, but this one doesn't do it well.

The scenery is drab, un-amusing and just plain pedestrian. Most of the time we barely ever see people walking around the city, which is odd, considering it's a city. The cast is sub-par giving us terrible characters. We have star Stephen Dorff, who is usually good and energetic in his roles, but is just drab in this. It seems he took this movie as a last option, or lost a bet, because he stumbles around the movie emotionless and completely non compos mentis. His character has no charisma or depth, so it's hard to like him or root for him. We barely get to know him, and his acting is as similar to a cardboard cut-out. McElhorn tries really hard to fill in for Dorff in the acting department with her over the top emotions and terrible reactions.

Once again, we never get to know about her character, so we never root for her or like her. The movie has one-dimensional trite sub-plots which only serve as plot devices to move through the story not to mention constant plot-holes and questions. At one point, a romance between the two is insinuated, but there's never any emphasis, so I never really care much, plus, it's insinuated that the victims die by their own worst fears, but there's never any emphasis, so we can't feel for them or get spooked. We also have Stephen Rea who plays a psychotic serial killer in this movie who occasionally makes shadowy appearances. When he appears, he scowls and grins like a comic book villain and he gives these off-key and trite monologues giving observations about death and such.

It's pretty (unintentionally) humorous when the victims begin dying. At first, they experience these sort of acidic LSD type of hallucinations that begin with visions of a spooky little "Village of the Damned" reject who bounces a ball... a lot and then it occasionally crumbles... then they see some weird stuff... and then... kersplat! They die. Too bad, this could have been some good material.

So, when you view Feardotcom, turn your eyes away, not because you may die, but because it's simply really bad.