The Internet is an easy place to lose yourself. It’s nothing at all to adapt another persona and say things you wouldn’t otherwise say with impunity. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day an enterprising filmmaker doesn’t come along and make a really brilliant horror film on the subject. I saw Fear.com the other night and I’m hear to tell you we’re gonna have to wait a little longer for that one.

Steven Dorff  plays a hardened NYC detective who teams up with an official from the health department to after 3 corpses turn up with similar symptoms. The one thing they seem to have in common is that they’ve all visited the same site, fear.com. After much discussion the two agree the only way to a solution is to visit the site itself.

I’d love to say “Boy what a stinker this is” and be done with it. Bad horror movies are usually pretty easy to poke fun at. Imagine how many laughs I could get out of the web address alone. (www.lousymovie.com was one idea). But if I did go the teasing route that would be dishonest,  because the first half of the movie is really quite interesting. It’s pretty clear that William Malone was going for something different. I got the feeling that he was shooting for a nourish mood similar to the vastly superior Dark City, a wonderful sci-fi film from the 90’s that about ten people saw, 8 of them critics who raved about it. Unfortunately things pretty much fall apart in the second half. I wish I could put my finger on it but I felt like I was watching paint dry while attending a bad family reunion and talking to a telemarketer at the same time.

There is definitely an interesting caste here. Steven Dorff has excellent horror credentials, his jet-set vampire easily being the best thing about Blade. Natasha McElhone (The Truman Show) is an elegant and intelligent actress who deserves to be more of a household name. And Steven Rea does an amazingly bad American accent yet manages to still be very creepy.

To sum it up, the art direction is very interesting, but things never really gel. A friend of mine pointed out a rather curious, even major, inconsistency in the plot. The fear.com Web site has a lot of  people logging on that we never see. Why aren’t they dying? I think Malone missed out on a great opportunity there. Just imagine a site where millions of people are logging on, only to die of a mysterious disease 48 hours afterwards. Now that’s a brilliant idea for a movie, if I do say so myself.

Rated R

In wide release tomorrow

2 reels out of 4

Changing Lanes

Available on video Tuesday

Rated R

What do you say about a movie that stars Ben Affleck as a smarmy lawyer and Samuel Jackson as a loose cannon insurance agent. You say “bravo” more for the acting than the story, which is a little weak. But director Roger Michell keeps things going at a great pace and lets the two stars go at it, no holds barred. Jackson plays a divorced father of two who has one last idea to get his family back. When he gets into a traffic accident with fast-track lawyer Gavin Banek all bets are off. At it’s best Changing Lanes recalls the socially conscious movies of the 70’s.