Alright, let’s jump in with both fists.
The girl ghost in the white dress who seeks revenge through technology was already kind of a genre of its own by the time the film came out. The casual horror observer said “Oh, the Ring.” The more interested horror fan raised his nose at the casual observer and said, “No, Ringu!” The seasoned horror fan was too busy shouting curse words followed by, “Not another angry ghost in a white dress!”
Let’s face it. What Lies Beneath was pretty much the same kind of movie, but without anything to make it genuinely frightening or even interesting.
Me, being off in my own world, grinned. “Yes! That’s the guy who did House on Haunted Hill!” Then, with that kind of silly anticipation you can only get when about to pay someone with real currency to scare you senseless, I talked the woman who eventually became my wife into going to see FearDotCom together.
Malone comes back with his visual style as well. The film is built around nightmarish hallucinations, which is visual style Malone seems to sincerely enjoy working with.
Did the movie deliver? At its best, absolutely.
Stephen Rhea’s performance as “The Doctor” left a lot to be desired. An interesting counterpoint to his performance would be Dee Snyder’s “Captain Howdy” in Strangeland. Rhea’s character was detached from his deeds, audibly expressing contempt for his own actions and the people who took interest in them. This created an uncharismatic, illogical and often dry villain. Strangeland’s “Captain Howdy,” was a villain who put himself through nearly everything that he put his victims through, was passionate about his actions, felt they were his life’s work, and even believed he was changing the world for the better. Howdy, then, had the insane insight that makes a villain charismatic and interesting.
Charles Manson will always be more frightening for his insane insight and charisma than most real-world villains.
There is a lot that can and probably should be done with the kind of villain archetype that “The Doctor” in FearDotCom fell into.
However, we do get more scary nurses. You can’t have a doctor without a scary nurse in a William Malone movie. I’m pretty sure you can’t even have a William Malone movie without a scary nurse. That’s alright by me.
Note to self: Write a “Nurses I Know” Interlude.
Back on track. The only other complaint about this movie is a character death involving a motor vehicle. Something about the last second of that looked too rigid. Rigid looks especially out of place in such a visually rich film.
The sound was there, although to a lesser extent than House on Haunted Hill. Again, “you had to be there” when the movie played in theaters.
The visuals consist of more camera experiments from the director. The director’s commentary explicitly states that the overall look of the movie was meant to be dark versus light, and that shadows or dark rooms were exceedingly dark for this purpose. The same concept duality would be better explored later in Parasomnia, but it made for a different looking movie in its own day. FearDotCom was released during a period when colored filters ruined way too many movies. At least dark shadows are genuinely scarier than a Smurf-blue or sewage-green filter over a werewolf.
Or a pale blue filter over a scary ghost girl in a white dress.
FearDotCom also works on the tried but frequently forgotten principle of messing with reality. There is a certain level of fright and fun in being unsure of what is real when the characters are experiencing such wild hallucinations. A lost grip on reality is my personal terror. Fear is a personal emotion, and the execution of those hallucinations touched that nerve with precision.
The final note I want to push is the mystery aspect of the movie. The colorful characters and bizarre occurrences recall more of the charm of Dark City than the tired tropes of private detective stories. The small roles and supporting cast deserve a lot of credit for putting a lot of flavor into FearDotCom.
Overall, FearDotCom is a rewarding experience. It mixes adept usage of a hallucinatory experience with an interesting paranormal mystery, a creepy serial killer, and an unusual cast of secondary characters. The strangeness of it all keeps me happy despite any weak points. This is why the movie gets a lot more rotation in my dvd player than I typically admit to most horror movie fanatics.
It’s not about the body count, the blood, or the splatter. It’s about the seedy underside of the fantasy genre, the terror of forgetting what is real, and the adventure of fighting against certain doom.
He has worked as a level designer for a small online video game, as the grim reaper in a haunted house, and traded web design for concert tickets and tattoos.In years past, he could be found performing improvised comedy or stage magic in the south side of Austin, Texas.
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