Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Man, I know Bill Malone must be a capable guy. Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver and Gil Adler and all the other TALES FROM THE CRYPT producers love this guy. He keeps getting work. Is it just that the material’s too thin? If so, then someone needs to unleash him on something really meaty and worthwhile. Sounds like The Pole Of Justice didn’t think this was it...
Hey there…PoleOfJustice here with my ruminations on the pile of celluloid known as FEARDOTCOM.
FEARDOTCOM is a bad movie. It’s a bold statement, and I’m sticking to it. You will not see a worse one this, or any other year. Actually, I’d hope you won’t see this at all.
In a talkback a little while ago, I expressed fear that RED DRAGON would blow the goat. It may well, but not nearly as many goats at FDC blows. Were talking a whole harem of goats. Line ‘em up and knock ‘em down. FDC is a black hole of a movie. It breaks down into nothing at such a basic, elemental level that it’s truly difficult to discuss. I have no idea where to begin, it’s all so weak.
Well, the one thing I can actually get somewhat annoyed about it the liberal “borrowing” of elements from other (and, by default, better) horror movies. Hmm, what’s stolen? Well, the plot for RING, of course, right down to the vengeful little girl manifesting herself in a modern format, etc. The website idea is from PULSE. The little girl in question is out and out stolen from Mario Bava’s stupendous KILL BABY KILL (a film so utterly brilliant that Frederico Fellini stole the little girl for his segment in SPIRITS OF THE DEAD.) A lot of the apartment buildings look like they were taken from SE7EN. There’s an underwater sequence that looked an awful lot like the beginning of the underwater scene in INFERNO (which, coincidentally or not, is often credited to Mario Bava, although INFERNO as a whole was directed by Dario Argento.) Blah blah blah.
Absolutely everyone phones this one in: the actors, the screenwriter, even the cinematographer. The film is so overwhelmingly dark that I had a big pain between my eyes afterwards. It’s like the scenes in ROAD TO PERDITION, which seem almost entirely black, except ROAD had something worth looking for in the murk, not to mention the murk served a purpose. Had I not known better, I would have assumed there was something wrong with the film stock. The severe lack of light is bad enough, but director William Malone feels the need to throw random shit on the screen, possibly to make it seem frenetic and nightmarish. Unfortunately, the visual effect is so soupy that the brain can’t process what’s going on. I don’t mean that things happen too fast, I mean that there’s so little definition in the visuals that all the eye registers is a slapdash parade of darkly colored blobs. If you squint (which I found myself doing, a lot) you can make out individual bits and pieces, but they’re uninspired and, surprise, lifted from other stuff (hey, look, it’s Lung Leg from that Richard Kern/Sonic Youth video!) This isn’t just an artistic blunder: this is a physical problem. I still haven’t lost the headache.
The film is so overwhelmingly unconvincing on such a basic level that I found myself arguing with the characters. For example, a scene in an abandoned factory with Natascha McElhone and a blind old woman, who just seems to be there to warm herself by a trash fire:
Natascha McElhone (Talking to the blind old woman:)
You seem to be expecting me.
(Me, to myself: No, she doesn’t. She’s just sitting there.)
Natascha: What are you looking at?
(Me: She has cataracts the size of Cleveland! She’s not looking at anything, you dolt!)
Natascha: Where is she?
(Me: What in God’s name are you doing? There is no indication whatsoever that this woman has the slightest idea of what you’re talking about!)
Or how about this little doozy, where they are at the autopsy of a long dead corpse, and can’t even sustain a thread of believability through the end of a line:
Coroner: The killer removed her organs, then placed them in plastic bags and put them back in. Standard autopsy procedure.
(Coroner removes a lipstick tube from inside the body)
She must have swallowed this before she died. Look, there’s a note inside.
(Me: Wait a minute, if all her insides were in plastic bags, wouldn’t the lipstick be in her stomach, therefore in a bag? What, did she swallow it AFTER he removed her organs? And if she was being tortured to death, how did she get a tube of lipstick, write a note, put it in the tube, and swallow it? If her hands were free to do that, wouldn’t she do something else, like fight?)
Etc, etc, etc. All this results in zero emotional content Plodding. Dull. Uneventful. So overwhelmingly inert that I can’t even really get up enough enthusiasm to really dig into it. This movie is completely, utterly, profoundly incoherent. Now, incoherence can add to a movie’s nightmarish qualities, but this is incoherent on a fundamental, technical level: the characters contradict themselves literally a few seconds after they assert something, I can’t make out what I’m supposed to be looking at on the screen, the emotional content, what little there is of it, makes no connection from shot to shot, let alone from scene to scene. They didn’t even bother to be consistent with their own damned title. The website in the film is feardotcom…dot com. It SHOULD be fear.com, but instead it’s feardotcom.com. A stupid, stupid, mistake, and the least of this film’s sins.
All of which results in a lot of unhappy moviegoers, although probably quite a bit of happy (and relaxed) goats. No. No no no. Bad movie. No biscuit. Pole out.
Wow. You’re breaking Smilin’ Jack Ruby’s heart, man. With each and every word.
"Moriarty" out.
