Granted, I've seen better horror flicks in my day, but this is a solid outing. Morty, the life-sized wooden doll, redefines creepy. Throw him in a dark wooden setting, and you get some solid terror.

The plot centers around a student Richard, well played by Eddie Bowz, who invites some friends to a wooden cabin to analyze their fears as study for his thesis papers. While there, Richard must confront his own inner demons which become magnified when he sees his childhood toy Morty at the cabin.

Soon Morty begins to terrorize the group, using their darkest fears as a weapon.

The cast was solid. Bowz handles the lead quite well and genre oddball Darin Heames(Night of the Demons 2 & Dr. Giggles) shines as his best pal with questionable morals. Heather Medway, portraying Bowz' love interest was the best actress involved, outshining Ann Turkel.

I recommend this for people who like to be creeped out. Has a dark atmosphere and the use of the foley artists as Morty chases people was handled well also.

Nice try…but that's about the only positive thing you can say about this lackluster attempt to blend psychological thriller with eerie horror monsters. The script desperately tries to be intelligent and innovating but the result is a very poor and tedious movie, even for the already low 90's standards. The story handles about an overly ambitious psychology student who motivates a clique of people to go on a mountain-weekend where he'll finish his thesis about phobias. The point is that all the participants get over their fears by talking about them and, in the meantime, our college boy can process his own childhood trauma. Upon arrival, everyone's fear comes to life in the shape of a life-size wooden dummy. Of course the puppet means trouble! It's made by Indians…it's always the Indians with their spiritual evils, I tell you!! This movie takes itself way too seriously and the makers actually seem to believe that the subject matter is deep and complex! It's not! It's more than obvious that every character hides one of several dark secrets and the viewer figures them all out long before they reveal the "truth" themselves. I've rarely seen a movie so predictable than "The Fear". The story gets more and more annoying near the end and, the more clever it tries to be, the more ridiculous it all looks. The wooden "evil personified" dummy isn't very impressive and the squeaky stretching-sounds he constantly makes aren't my idea of eerie sound effects. Pinocchio actually was a lot scarier…at least he could do tricks with his nose. The acting performances are forgettable, even though I'm sure the guy who came up with the idea to offer Wes Craven a small role is very proud of himself. In case you're looking for some really unsettling evil-dummy horror movies, check out "Pin" (brilliant but disgracefully underrated 80's thriller) and "Magic" (staring a young Anthony Hopkins".

This movie is seriously lacking in its one fundamental ingredient; horror. It's amazingly shocking to see what weird choices the film-makers made with this movie, that all go at the expense of the quality of the movie.

The main concept and idea behind this movie certainly deserved to get a better treatment. And I also must admit that when the true horror/slasher aspects of the movie kick in, the movie is actually still quite good and enjoyable to watch. But only problem is that it isn't until the last 20 minutes or so that the movie truly becomes a slasher and 10 minutes later it has all ended again already. And what an horrible sudden ending it has. So there is actually very little to enjoy for the horror lovers among us, myself included.

The movie is basically all build up and no pay off. The movie keeps dragging on with its character development and only throws in some fake scares to help you to remind that this is supposed to be an horror movie you're watching.

This movie is some real wasted potential. I really liked the killer and the whole idea behind him, which makes me wish that this movie was given into the hands of someone more capable, or someone with some more experience with the genre at the very least. This was the first and only, as of yet, movie that Vincent Robert directed. Prior to this he also had very little experience with the movie making business, so why he ever was given the opportunity to directed this movie is a bit of a mystery to me. Wes Craven was in the cast, couldn't he at least had given the film-makers a couple of tips on film-making as well.

The movie has a cheap video look over it but hey, that's what you get from an '90's movie. It tries to be like a good genre movie from the '80's but it basically only does this by throwing in a bunch of unlikeable persons, who are also all sleeping with each other, or at least are busy trying to.

Granted that this is far from the worst thing I have ever seen but it unfortunately ain't much good, original or interesting enough either.

4/10

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