FEARDOTCOM

Imagine being alone at home! It's the middle of the night and you can't sleep! You get up and start browsing the internet, from one site to another, a strange link starts flashing in the top left corner, "WWW.FEARDOTCOM.COM" in black with italic characters, nothing special! Simple advertisement... you think... and yet there's something that keeps drawing your eye to it, its continuous flashing is like it's inviting you in! What do you do? You visit it because after all, sleep is gone and maybe not only that once you've pressed the first mouse button with your index finger on the link. The site greets you with inhuman screams and terrifying scenes with, in the middle, a beautiful and fascinating woman who even calls you by name and invites you to play, you can't back out now, the curiosity is too great, ... "click"... it's the sound of your mouse, you're in!! From now on, you have two days to win before being killed by absurd internal hemorrhages with equally absurd hallucinations driven by your greatest fears. This is what happens in the film "Paura.com" by director William Malone, already the author of: "The Mystery of the House on the Hill" (remake of a 1958 film) and "Creatures". Set in New York, it features the young detective Mike Reilly played by actor Stephen Dorff ("Blade" and "Darkness Falls") and the collaborator Terry Huston played by Natascha McElhone ("Solaris"), who investigate the death of 4 people who died after 48 hours of connecting to the feardotcom.com site. To solve the case, they think the only solution is to connect personally to the site. This time, the script of a horror film shifts via ether to what has become the world's borderless means of communication, the Internet. After the killer videotape with the death call of "The Ring" that told you you only had 7 days to live, here the deadline is 48 hours and it's about the monitor rather than the TV, for this reason and not only (which I can't explain for obvious reasons), "Paura.com" seems to resemble the story of "The Ring" almost as a byproduct (note the angelic blonde-haired girl and the frightened face of the first victim, I won't say more!!). The film stands out for the excellent dark atmospheres of a dark and rainy New York (the film was shot in Europe), with huge, desolate and abandoned factories that serve as the main settings. The tension and I won't say terror, is present only in brief moments (very brief), the story doesn't flow very well, the director seems to have to forcefully insert the "love" factor between the two protagonists at some point, really out of place. Nothing remarkable about the music (Nicholas Pike) suitable but certainly not memorable. The talent (undisputed) of Stephen Dorff is not enough in a film that we could define as unlucky because it was released in theaters a month after The Ring, maybe if it had come out earlier... ... MAYBE!!