| Director | Rachel Talalay |
|---|---|
| Budget | $12 million |
| Box office | $5.1 million |
While working at a computer store in Cleveland, Ohio, serial killer Karl Hochman, known as "The Address Book Killer" due to habitually stealing address books and choosing his victims from them, obtains the address book of Terry Munroe, a customer, as the store manager uses the book to demonstrate a handheld scanner. He copies a page of her address book into a computer. On a rainy night while heading home, Karl hurriedly drives into an oncoming lane and swerves to miss a truck. This causes his car to go off the road into a cemetery, all while he laughs maniacally.
In the emergency room, he is put into an MRI machine. A surge from an electrical storm causes his soul to be transferred into a computer. Now, as a network-based entity, Karl continues to plot his killing spree using various objects connected to the electrical grid and computer networks.
Karl accesses the scanned page from Terry's address book and begins to kill everyone listed on the page. Her boss, Frank Mallory, becomes the first victim when his microwave oven begins irradiating the entire kitchen. Another friend, Elliot Miller, gets burned to death when a hand dryer turns into a flamethrower. Later on, babysitter Carol Maibaum is hired to look after Terry's son Josh and his best friend Frazer. However, Carol becomes the third victim; she is electrocuted from an exposed electrical cord on the kitchen floor when the dishwasher explodes and floods the kitchen.
The police do not believe the theory that Karl is on a killing spree after his death, but Josh realizes the order of the killings parallels a list of contacts from Terry's address book. Terry, along with noted computer hacker Bram Walker, unplugs everything in her house.
The police then receive anonymous reports of an armed robbery, a hostage situation, domestic violence, and a murder in progress, all at Terry's house. The police open fire on the home after mistaking an exploding pole transformer for gunfire. After realizing their mistake, they cease fire. Terry's mother goes into shock during the siege and is transported to the hospital for recovery. Aided by Bram and Josh, Bram manages to defeat Karl by introducing a computer virus that traps him in a physics laboratory. They activate an atom smasher located in the laboratory, which draws Karl in and destroys him with its extremely powerful magnetic field.
As the film ends, Bram tells Terry to turn off a heart rate monitor in an ambulance, causing the screen to fade to black.