We only have a few scary movies left before Halloween and today we are continuing along our series with a movie that I’ve never seen before but have definitely heard of. I remember it being advertised heavily when it came out but I just had no desire to see it. Then I learned that it has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and my interest was piqued. This is basically one of those “watch a video and get killed” movies but because it’s from the early 2000s, the advent of the internet plays a crucial role. This one is directed by William Malone, whose only real other feature film was the House on Haunted Hill remake which did well at the box office and with critics, so it’s kind of sad to see how bad he fell off with this one. This one also features actor Stephen Dorff in a lead role which is horrifying in and of itself. I will be writing about one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen in which Dorff stars in an upcoming issue, but I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Let’s focus on the topic at hand.
What are we watching today? Featdotcom, the 2002 internet video horror movie that copies the classic “watch this and die” plotline of so many other, better horror movies but adds the internet to make it extra current. As I mentioned, this one has a whopping 3% on Rotten Tomatoes so I already know what I’m up against. I also read that multiple cuts were made to this movie to get it down to an R rating from NC-17, so I bet it was even worse before. This one was a box office bomb, making back less than half of its $40 million budget, so it was just a failure all around. Well, there’s nothing we love here at Stale Popcorn more than a failure of a movie, so let’s press play and hope we don’t die.
Our movie begins with a scared man, Polidori (Udo Kier), clutches his briefcase and walks cautiously through a subway platform where he drops his glasses. It’s very dark and there’s a Doberman pinscher down there by itself for some reason. The subway doesn’t look open but hey maybe there was an MTA strike. He looks nervous as a ball bounces by him and a little girl (Jana Güttgemanns) begins playing with it. The little girl is pretty terrifying and stared directly at Polidori as she plays. He begins shaking with fear as a train approaches and the little girl is on the tracks. He runs down to get her to safety but drops his glasses and is hit by the train, causing him to propel into the wall, dead, with blood leaking from his eyes and mouth. Yeesh. The next morning, Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone), a Dept of Health researcher, finds a dead mouse in her slipper left by her car, and gets ready for work as she is kinda late. In the subway at the scene of the death, detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) investigates, noting that Polidori’s eyes are bugged out and he doesn’t appear to have died from electrocution. Mike is handed a book about secrets of the internet that Polidori was clutching so hard that they had to pry it out of his dead fingers, literally. We see another man on a website for accessing “distressed furniture” in a liveshow, which turns out to be coded access terms to watch torture videos of women.
Mike investigates Polidari’s death despite the fact that the FBI is supposed to be handling it. Mike is slightly obsessed with taunting letters coming from someone named The Doctor who seems to be a serial killer eluding the police. At the station, German exchange student Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) is brought in and being held by multiple officers as he sputters and acts uncontrollably with his eyes bloody. Mike asks for a call to be put into the DOH to see about a bloody eye virus going around, as if that wouldn’t be on the fucking news. He and detective Sykes (Jeffrey Combs) go to investigate Dieter’s place for clues. When they arrive, the place looks wrecked. The cops chalk it up to him being an artist. Great investigatory skills by the NYPD, a round of applause folks. Mike finds the water in the bathroom still running and then finds a dead body in the bathtub. Terry arrives and introduces herself to Mike but warns not to touch the dead woman as the woman is displaying signs of a hemorrhagic virus similar to Ebola. Mike tries to call into the station but Terry asks to take a sample to test, despite it being evidence. They find the German word for “murderer” and the numbers 48 painted in blood on the wall of the cell where Dieter was in. Dieter has died. This is strange.
Terry tells Mike there’s a chance they could all be infected already but when lab results come back, they learn no one has died from a virus. They decide to use a camcorder to further their investigation and record a woman. I have no idea why, but they do. Like what does that have to do with anything that’s happened? Mike expresses his germaphobia to Terry who seems to have taken a liking to him despite her being slightly awkward with him. The woman they were filming is told to come by a theater to audition for an acting role and given a business card. Terry and Mike watch Dieter’s camcorder to try and find clues. They see Dieter and the girl from the bathtub in various states of undress and then watching something on their computer where women’s screams are heard. The footage cuts to Dieter acting unhinged before the girl goes into the bathtub, Dieter runs off and the camera falls to the ground where it was found.
The woman from before (sorry, don’t know her character name so I don’t know the actress’s name) goes to the theater for her audition where she is brutally assaulted and seemingly killed. Terry gets a parking ticket that Mike offers to take care of for her. Wow this dialogue sucks lol. At the office, Terry is asked to meet with her boss Mr. Turnbull (Nigel Terry) who asks if the German kids had Ebola. Turnbull himself doesn’t look too great but states he’s just tired. I think this is who was watching the videos on the “furniture” website earlier. He states his computer is broken and he sent it for repair and looks to be in bad shape before Terry leaves him. Turnbull goes to a trainyard to smoke a cigarette and sees the creepy little girl from earlier. He gets in his car which is parked there for some reason and he’s bleeding from the nose. Gross bro. He lights his cig and notices two burning cigs in the ashtray already before his hand starts bleeding. We get a really lame attempt at a jump scare as the little girl stalks his car. His car won’t unlock and it’s on fire. He speeds away recklessly and loses control of the car, crashing into a wall and going through the windshield.
At a lab, Thana (Siobhan Flynn) is examining the girl from the bathtub earlier (Birthe Wolter), who has been topless her entire appearance. Thana has no explanation but it appears she had something similar to an instant stroke where her heart swelled up and her eyes bled. There is another victim admitted, Turnbull. Terry says, “oh my god it’s Eddie Turnbull!” in the stupidest voice before she then runs out to the hall in shock. Turnbull’s wife (Elizabeth McKenchie) tells Terry and Mike that her husband was becoming paranoid, always on the internet though he seemed afraid of it. Sounds like some groups of people we have in society today. They take his computer for examination. We the audience are “treated” to more footage from the torture porn website. The guy torturing the girl seems to be The Doctor (Stephen Rea) that Mike was looking for earlier. The Doctor interrogates the bound and crying woman before confirming he will kill her for the internet’s watching experience and wants to know more intimate details of her life so the audience can identify before she dies. That’s kinda sick and not in the California way.
Mike and Terry, who I guess is a detective now too, are furthering their investigation. Mike wants to bring his forensic programmer friend Denise (Amelia Curtis) in to investigate the broken hard drives on the computers of all the victims. She promises to see what she can do so long as the files aren’t corrupted. Terry, meanwhile, watches the German kids’ home movie again trying to figure out what the two were watching on the computer. She notes that the girl died in the bathtub 48 hours after they watches the video online (based on timestamps) and that Dieter had written “48” in blood on the wall of the cell he died in. Denise discovers matches on all the hard drives for feardotcom and you know I love when the title appears in the movie. She accesses and witnesses the torture lobby and a giant roach crawls out of her computer before she kills it. She logs out but the site pops back up on its own and she is drawn to watch more. She follows prompts of a woman in a video asking if the viewer wants to see her hurt before some gruesome images appear and horrify Denise. We get more footage of the Doctor and the girl he has bound. Denise meets up with Mike and Terry and she is noticeably skittish. She hands them her findings, saying all the victims have the same fear site in common. Mike explains who the Doctor is to the women. Denise leaves in a hurry before promising that she can trace who’s behind the site and affirming that she’s fine.
Terry and Mike go to a pub looking for Frank Bryant (Michael Sarrazin), a man seated in the dark receiving some under the table loving from an older woman. They ask him about his book, the internet book Polidori died clutching. He deems that Polidori was a good friend but the book was a load of shit that he wrote for money, all fictionalized. He worked on the concept of a network of supercomputers with Polidori and a site that would host all of human fear and desire. He deems Polidori to be out of his mind and everything bullshit but tells them to come back if they need him again for anything. Mike explains the torture methods of the Doctor to Terry, explaining his name is Alistair Pratt and he was kicked out of medical school. He stayed ahead of law enforcement by constantly changing the hosting site for the “fear website”. They determine that every person who died did so exactly 48 hours after they logged onto the fear site. Worrying for Denise, they rush to find her when they learn she never made it to work. Denise, meanwhile, is shivering on the floor of her apartment, writing in chalk and looking scared out of her mind. She begins seeing hundreds of roaches in her apartment which cause her to panic until she realizes it’s a hallucination. She starts to see them again, crawling out of her mouth. Terry keeps trying to call as her, Mike and a bunch of squad cars head to Denise. Mike and Terry get out of the car just as Denise falls to her death on top of the car. They were too late for Denise but just in time for themselves.
Mike is filled with regret over Denise’s death. He notes that Denise doesn’t fit the 48 hours pattern, but Terry notes that maybe whatever Denise was experiencing was enough to drive her to kill herself early. She notes that she did research and all the victims so far died in the manner of their greatest fears. Turnbull was scared of car crashes. The girl in the bathtub was scared of drowning. Mike seems to think someone killed Denise as she got too close to the investigation. Terry makes Mike promise not to go on the site. I think it’s implied the two have sex and Mike takes off into the night. Mike immediately goes onto the site, so he was lying to get laid. Typical scum. The website knows his name and claims to know what he wants. He recognizes the Doctor’s first victim as the hostess of the site. She challenges him to find her in 48 hours and get possession of her but he dies if he fails. Guess he’s in it now. What a fucking idiot.
An overwhelming sense of fear blasts him away from the computer and he starts having creepy visions. He finds the bouncing ball and it breaks apart in his hands and he’s sent to wander a creepy corridor. I have completely lost my place in this movie. I’ll be honest, I’ve had to pause it a couple times and I’m only halfway through and have been watching for three hours. The things I put myself through for you readers. He boards an elevator and a mysterious woman drops her glove before departing. He tries to give it to her and we are treated to more horrible attempts at jump scares. The “scary” parts of this movie are not scary in the least. Mike is taken away in an ambulance and tells Terry he saw Jeannie Richardson (Gesine Cukrowski), the “dead girl”. He insists she’s alive, living in the “wires” between the websites. I don’t know if this movie about the internet knows how the internet works. Mike makes Terry promise she won’t “go there” and so we have about ten seconds before Terry accesses the site, too. God these people are idiots. She asks the site why it’s killing Mike and it answers that he’s “guilty of watching” before showing her torture and the same horrifying visions Mike had earlier. How stupid are these people? I’m supposed to care about them for another (checks time) FORTY MINUTES?!?!? Christ, this will never end.
Terry wakes up on the floor of her apartment which seems trashed. She goes to Mike’s office to try and look at the files, much to the annoyance of Sykes. Terry starts to get terrors while looking at Jeannie’s file. Sykes sexually harasses her and blood comes from her nose. It starts pouring from the files and she runs from the room. Back in the torture footage, the Doctor continues to be a creep as his subscriber numbers rise. Terry goes to speak with Jeannie’s mother (Joan McBride) who shows Terry childhood photos of Jeannie. Oh shit! Jeannie’s the little girl in the visions! Terry realizes this and takes a seat. Jeannie’s mother confesses that she was a hemophiliac who could bleed to death from a single cut if not on her meds. She was terrified of all things sharp and always played with her favorite bouncy ball until she was old enough to be into boys. Terry shows photos of all of Jeannie’s former residences to her mother and asks for information on them. She goes to investigate an old steel mill Jeannie used to play at. Why isn’t Mike helping her? They went on the site hours apart, shouldn’t be also still have enough wits about him to be out there too? This movie sucks.
At the mill, Terry finds a creepy old woman with blank eyes. Terry asks, “where is she” and the woman points to a stream of water or something, I don’t know. Terry goes to explore. For some reason, this mill has like a deep underwater passage? This movie really makes zero sense. She’s swimming underwater longer than me in GTAV and finally comes across a corpse. She brings it to the surface. She goes to find Mike in a psychiatric ward and begins to panic. Mike seems to be having night terrors. Terry gets a phone call asking her if she’s ready to play the game, warning her time is running out. She sees the bouncy ball roll by in the hall. She creeps around, terrified, and Mike seemingly disappears from his bed. Terry is led into a creepy room that looks like the torture den while an omnipresent voice asks her to come watch and hurt her. There is screaming in the distance. Terry tells the spirit she found her body and did what she wanted. The voice tells her that she knows what Terry really wants and beckons Terry to find her. It just occurred to me that Terry found her body and all she did was ask her mom what the pictures show. How shitty are these detectives that they had this file for all this time and didn’t even ask her mother anything? But also, how do they have pictures of the mill in the first place? Nothing about this movie makes any sense and I shudder at the fact that there’s still 25 minutes left.
We get a bunch of visions of torture and I have no idea what’s real and what’s just a poorly filmed hallucination at this point. Terry comes to and asks the staff what time it is, realizing her 48 hours is ticking away. She gets home and Mike is there waiting for her. Mike confesses that he’s drifting in and out more often and he’s running out of time. They head to the morgue with Jeannie’s corpse and learn that she was cut open while still alive when the coroner mistakenly believes she already had an autopsy. She notes the poor patch job the killer did putting her back together. They find a lipstick in her stomach with a note stating “the guilty must be punished” with an address on the back and they take off.
In the car, they note that Jeannie died being cut up, her biggest fear, and surmise that she must have been tortured for 48 hours before she was killed. Great detective work. Mike’s having a rough go, seeing visions while Terry drives. I wonder what Mike’s biggest fear is. He should probably avoid that. They go to the address and Terry creeps around, finding some computers and stuff. There’s a TV monitor playing what looks like old horror movies. She walks into a room with corpses skinned and gutted where Mike joins her. She finds handwritten pages and some magazines and thinks she’s found who the Doctor is. Mike calls Sykes, who is busy playing poker, and tells him to send backup to the steel mill. Uhhh why did they need the magazines to find that? Wasn’t Terry already there? God this movie is so frustrating.
The Doctor is showing his victim videos of Jeannie being tortured while he seemingly closes in to kill her. Terry and Mike pull up to the cooling plant at the mill, where Mike gets the Doctor at gunpoint right before he can cut the girl’s chest open. The Doctor sarcastically welcomes Mike and puts a blade to the girl’s neck, saying guns are too impersonal and to really hurt someone, you need to get up close. He hides behind the girl, knowing Mike won’t shoot. He tells Mike backup won’t be coming and reveals Sykes’s dead body hanging from the wall. How quick was Sykes that he beat Mike and Terry there and Doc didn’t even barely have to interrupt his torture stream to kill him? Say what you want about the Doctor (evil, soulless) but his time management skills are impeccable. Terry shows Doc the lipstick tube which genuinely causes him to look panicking. Mike shoots him in the leg while Terry frees the girl. Mike goes to apprehend the Doc, but Doc pulls a gun and shoots Mike in the chest. Guess he’s not a man of his word after all. All of this is apparently still streaming live. Mike falls down dying and Terry stabs the Doctor. She goes to aid Mike as the girl gets herself off the torture rack. Doctor comes up behind Terry and puts a knife to her neck. Why the fuck are they not making sure this guy is down and dead?? This is so frustrating. He begins strapping Terry to the rack but Mike gets a hold of a keyboard. He logs into the website and causes Doc to look at the monitors, finally facing the horrors of all he did to Jeannie. How did he not look at the site before if he designed it?
He's transported into like some weird realm where he sees Jeannie in multiple forms and Jeannie tells him it’s “time to feel”, a nod to him telling the victim earlier that he no longer feels anything. He’s deemed guilty by Jeannie’s spirit who tells him he’s going to die. He does, bleeding from the mouth. Mike dies too, from the gunshot wound. Terry is seemingly fine and the curse I guess is broken? Later we see Terry in her bed. Her phone rings and she answers it but the line is nothing but static. She rolls over all sad and pets her pet cat, and that’s our movie.
Well, that fucking sucked! Like, did they chop the entire ending off? There has to be more, right? No explanation of the resolution? Is Jeannie’s soul free? Is the website uncursed now that Doc is dead? Was that Mike on the phone at the end? What happened to the victim Doc had tied up? They wrapped this thing up pretty quickly for dragging the first part out so god damn long. Ugh. Horrible. Not a fan of this one whatsoever. I totally understand the 3%. I’m glad this didn’t get a sequel but I almost want to go looking for alternate endings just to see if anyone can help me make less of a mess out of this. Almost. I don’t think I’ll be doing it today. If you’d like to torture yourself with this movie about torture, it’s streaming on all the free apps (Tubi, Pluto, Vudu). Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.