The advent of the internet, as with all great advancements in communication technology, brought with it myriad new ways for nefarious individuals to find and lure in their unsuspecting victims. Those of you who, like me, have grown up in the digital age will undoubtedly be all-too-familiar with how the world wide web brought societal fears of stranger danger from the street corner right into your own home; stories of serial killers browsing forums and chat rooms in search of new prey were already scary enough in the early internet age without even considering the existence of the enigmatic ever-watching phantom of the “hacker”, a sinister stranger who could make their way into your living room at the touch of a button without you even noticing. With middle-class suburban computer owners being gifted a whole new smorgasbord of paranoid fears, it’s no wonder that the horror genre has had its eyes set on the internet since its outset – to mixed success, admittedly. However, to obscure Greek genre master filmmaker Nico Mastorakis, one concept was more thrilling and intense than all of the aforementioned threats combined: watching award-winning actress Nastassja Kinski surf the net in what might be the ugliest house in Los Angeles.
Mastorakis, for those of you who don’t know, is quite the prolific cult figure, having taken on pretty much every genre in a career which spans over 40 years; from gung-ho action, to windswept slashers, to watching a crazed religious fanatic do the (video) nasty with a goat, Nico has done it all. Over the past few years, Blu-Ray distributors have fought tooth and nail to get their hands on every single title in his filmography, with cult veterans Arrow Video remaining supreme with seven of the director’s titles under their label. DotCom for Murder (stylised as such in this review so that it doesn’t become a punctuation nightmare), an absolutely wild digital titular riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Dial M for Murder (1954), was one of the few remaining Mastorakis titles to not yet be given a UK Blu-Ray release, and the reason why becomes fairly clear once you actually watch the film and realise that it isn’t very good. At all.
In spite of the film’s namesake, the plot of DotCom for Murder is more indebted to another work from the Master of Suspense, 1954’s Rear Window, with Kinski playing the wheelchair-bound heroine Sondra, who is introduced to the joys of riding the information superhighway by her husband, Ben – played, bizarrely, by The Who member and legendary rockstar Roger Daltrey. Daltrey disappears from the film entirely after his first scene, leaving Sondra free to snoop around her husband’s American Love Online profile, hoping to find evidence of his numerous cyber-sex affairs. It’s on one of her spouse’s saucy chat rooms that she crosses paths with Werther (played in truly absurd fashion by relatively unknown actor Jeffery Dean), a “sex-ophobic” psycho-killer with an RGB keyboard, pro hacking skills, and a predilection for spontaneous nonsensical poetry readings. After digitally wounding Werther’s ego, Sondra and her friend Misty (actress Nicollette Sheridan) bear witness to a brutal live-streamed murder, which is only the beginning of their problems.
Its early-internet ultra-’2000s charms are limited, and by the end, all this film has in store for the viewer is a flatly delivered, by-the-numbers stalker-thriller full of story beats which have been played far better elsewhere.
Mastorakis, obviously, was aiming to do Hitchcock with hard drives – with a liberal amount of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) thrown in for good measure – but there’s no shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t entirely successful in replicating the quality of said directorial maestro. DotCom for Murder opens strong, with a credits sequence full of shifty mini-DV camcorder footage of salacious webpages and forbidden browser-based looping clips of plastic-wrapped corpses, but beyond a jankily-edited first-person shower stabbing, the vibes of uncomfortable virtual voyeurism end there.
For the first half of the film, we’re left with Kinski and Sheridan spouting clumsy computer jargon as they attempt to fend off what every single Hollywood director in the 1990s thought was hacking; it’s a consistently confounding trainwreck, for sure, not helped by the brief shots of the villain watching endless reels of porn site ads whilst sat naked on his bed surrounded by fetuses in jars – but I’m not going to deny that it’s absurdly entertaining viewing. Unfortunately, once the plot logs off the internet and enters the real world, the film runs out of steam, with its previously hilarious incompetence devolving into pure tedium. Indeed, the only thing of real interest about DotCom for Murder’s half-baked suspenseless home invasion plot is the introduction of technophobic FBI Agent Matheson, the film’s second instance of unexpected musical casting in the form of ‘80s pop sensation Huey Lewis (yes, as in “Huey Lewis and the News”, I’m not kidding you). It’s an unengaging slog full of characters making poor decisions simply for the sake of furthering the plot – and even with the movie dragging its feet, its conclusion still feels rushed and unsatisfying.
DotCom for Murder is a film that’s only really worth being recommended to Arrow completists, and even then only advisably watched with a group of friends and a couple of drinks. Its early-internet ultra-’2000s charms are limited, and by the end, all this film has in store for the viewer is a flatly delivered, by-the-numbers stalker-thriller full of story beats which have been played far better elsewhere. If it’s any consolation, those of you who still wish to dial M for Mastorakis will be glad to hear that the transfer on this new Blu-Ray is crisp and clear whilst not losing any of the film’s very 2002 colour palette; no digital crust is lost from previous editions, and for once that’s a good thing.
Extras include a fascinating archival making-of documentary from the film’s original Omega Entertainment DVD release, guaranteed to spellbind you with its Windows Movie Maker transitions, Comic Sans titles and the completely unpredictable remarks of the man, the myth, the Mastorakis himself. Among the valuable behind-the-scenes snippets of footage, Nico rambles in near-poetic fashion about the extensive time he has spent in numerous erotic chat rooms, his obsession with androgynous bodies, and even makes a hilariously questionable on-set joke about shooting Huey Lewis dead for promotional purposes. Should you choose to watch it, this featurette will undoubtedly turn you into a die-hard Mastorakis-head. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
DotCom for Murder (2002) is out now on Arrow Video Blu-Ray
