.com for Murder

The final feature film by Greek do-it-all indie filmmaker Nico Mastorakis, 2002’s .com for Murder is a fitting coda for his career.  Always chasing the next trend, Mastorakis stumbles upon a killer idea – Hitchcock reinvented for the digital age – and proceeds to make the wrong choices nearly every step along the way, starting with a cast seemingly chosen at random from a Dancing with the Stars punchbowl.  

 

Nastassja Kinski stars as a wheelchair bound internet voyeur who pisses off the wrong porn-obsessed hacker. Soon she and her sister (Nicollette Sheridan) are trapped in their Hollywood Hills smart home, part of a murderous live-stream with their deaths planned as the grand finale.  Their only hope for rescue comes in the form of Huey Lewis (I’m not kidding) as a friendly neighborhood FBI agent.  And did I mention the home is owned by Roger Daltry?

 

Mastorakis has been making movies his own way for a very long time.  And if nothing else, he understands the mechanics of how to make a respectable thriller.  But .com for Murder suffers from a common failing in films based around cutting edge technology: it gets it all wrong.  Our literary-minded serial killer is able to hack chatrooms, spoof phone calls and take over an entire security system instantaneously…all over a DSL line! These digital superpowers might move along the plot but they make Mastorakis’ film look like a cheat…something Hitchcock always managed to avoid.

 

Speaking of the Master of Suspense, .com for Murder lifts quite a bit from Rear Window and Dial M for Murderwhich can be justified as “tributes.”   But when the films blatantly copies Silence of the Lambs on two occasions, well, that just creative laziness, something that Mastorakis, for all his faults, could never be accused of before.  As ladies in distress, Kinski and Sheridan actually acquit themselves quite well and Huey Lewis is a hoot to root for as the hero.  But saddled with a ridiculous bad guy (Jeffery Dean) and a poor understanding of internet culture, .com for Murder should stay behind everyone’s firewall.

 

So if you’re a fan, here’s where all that bad stuff goes out the window.  Because Arrow Video’s Blu-ray is a remarkable keepsake for Mastorakis fans.  Not only to you get an archival self-promotional featurette, but collection of behind-the-scenes footage hosted by the director as he goes through multiple opening sequences and raw footage of the sexy green screen footage shot with adult film stars Julie Strain and Shelley Michelle.  This first pressing also contains a collector’s booklet with new writing on the film.   

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