261 Days of Horror, Day 47: Pulse
Mar. 6th, 2007 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiPulse. 2006. Directed by Jim Sonzero. Written by Wes Craven and Ray Wright. Distributed by The Weinsten Company.
Oh noes! Teh intarwebs are evil! And technology, that savior of civilization, actually can hurt us! What an original concept. Certainly nothing I've seen in FearDotCom, The Ring, or eight billion other other flicks. But surely Pulse will come up with a unique and interesting twist on the theme.
Or not.
We start with a mopey kid, wandering across a college campus. He sees strange pale guys who look like rejects from Whitley Streiber movies out of the corner of his eyes every once in a while, and eventually he gets attacked in a library filled with inexplicable strobe lights, where one of the things throws books from shelves in a cheap attempt to convince the audience they're watching Ghostbusters. It then grabs his head and sucks out his soul.
We now head to a bar, to try to drown the irksomeness of the first scene with alcohol and Kristen Bell. Alas, Bell plays Mopey Girl, because she's been dating the guy from the first scene of the movie, whose name is Josh. As her annoying cannon fodder friends attempt to convince her that she should part-tay a little bit, she continues to mope. Over that night and the next day, we see how plugged-in everyone is, with cell phones, web sites, chat rooms, Neopets*, and all that other stuff college kids are into nowadays.
Eventually, Bell decides that instead of calling her boyfriend, she should actually visit him in person. On getting to his house, we meet Josh and recognize him as the mopey guy from the first scene, and he's even mopier now that his soul's been sucked. He tells her to wait a minute and heads to another room. While waiting, Bell hears a noise from the closet, and opens it to reveal that Josh has kept his trapped cat in the closet, starving nearly to death. This makes me completely unsympathetic to him or to her (for even dating him), so I'm pretty much just wishing that Josh would go and hang himself now.
Fortunately, the magic of moviemaking is all about wish fulfillment, and next scene, we have one dead cat abuser, hung poetically with either phone or cat-5 cable (it's hard to tell).
We get a few generic grief scenes (Bell's character apparently likes cat-torturers), including Bell having nightmares about Josh, Bell venting to a shrink about Josh, and Bell getting IMs and emails saying "Help Me" from Josh. She realizes that this last one is strange and not a typical sign of grief, especially since the other disposable friends are getting them, too. One of them, Stone, decides that Josh's computer must have been left on, proving that being immersed in technology doesn't mean actually understanding it. He breaks into the old apartment, sees that the computer is unplugged, and then gets jumped by a ghostly female figure.
The next day, Bell calls Stone, and he's sitting in the dark and moping. Even as Bell's Mopiness Sense tingles, Stone's arm seems to be filling with ink. Instead of checking on her friend, Bell goes to Josh's old place, and discovers that it's now for rent, but that the landlady sold the computer to That Annoying Guy From Lost (meaning Ian Somerhalder, not Matthew Fox or Dominic Monaghan), who she tracks down using her borrowed Veronica Mars detective skills. She accuses him of harassing everyone in Josh's address book, but he tells her that he still hasn't turned on the computer.
At home, Somerhalder finally turns on the computer and finds all sorts of images of people dying and looking mopey. Meanwhile, Bell and her roomie get a package from Josh that he sent before he died, containing red tape and a warning note saying that the red tape keeps the pale guys away. They also see a CNN report about the epidemic of suicides and mopeyness that's been striking the world. It's like a massive emo attack!
Somerhalder shows Bell the creepy stuff on the computer (and she sees yet another pale guy on the screen), then she sees a pale guy on her bus ride home before a professor tries to get hit by the bus, and then sees another woman throw herself off a water tower. Because this is a Japanese horror movie, we have a typically creepy dream sequence, followed by Bell seeing a pale guy in her bathtub**.
The college is getting more and more desolate, with only a handful of folks in class now. We get a few more pale guy scares (one haunts Bell in a nasty public bathroom), and then Stone's friend Tim comes looking for his buddy and sees Stone get sucked into a wall. Tim runs to his dorm room, pastes red tape over the windows and doors, and then, in a fit of stupidity, peeks out through the peephole, where he sees a pale guy who reaches through and grabs him.
Meanwhile, Bell's shrink is working late when he sees a picture of his late wife (or possibly daughter) on the computer screen before being jumped by yet another pale guy. Yes, even the really minor character die in this movie in an attempt to stretch things out for over an hour!
We get more moments of creepiness (including the famous "inkjet printer spits out a bunch of sheets that form Josh's face" scene that would be good if it didn't appear in all the commercials), and eventually, Bell's best friend goes to the laundromat, where a pale guy starts throwing laundry out of the machine she's using before attacking her. Because that's how pale guys roll.
We head to the climax, with Bell watching the aforementioned best friend disintigrate into nothingness, which actually makes t he latter a less annoying character. With Bell and Somerhalder the only survivors, they make a run through the city, encountering other panicking folks on their way to a computer company that they found info about on Josh's machine. Once there, they meet Exposition Guy. He tells them how the search for wider 'net access led to bandwidths that only the dead can use, which makes perfect sense if you smoke enough crack.
The heroes (not counting Exposition Guy, who hides in his little red-taped room) make a run to the local computer center, where they try uploading the "cure" program that Josh had waiting for them. They dodge a bunch of pale guys, and get the program uploaded, but the computer resets itself, making it all pointless.
As they run away, an airplane gratuitously crashes into the computer center, and the two survivors grab a car and head away from the city and all technology. Just when we think they're safe and napping in the middle of nowhere, the radio in the car comes on and warns people that the pale creatures attack via wireless and cell phones. Naturally, the creatures pick this moment to attack, but Somerhalder manages to drive away into an area without cell phone covereage, and the creatures fade away. They chuck Bell's cell phone out of the car, and ponder how this wonderful technology that was supposed to keep people together instead destroyed them. How deep!
If Pulse accomplishes anything, it might be to finally convince the world that just because a horror movie is a remake of an Asian film doesn't mean it won't suck. There's not an original thought in this movie, nor is there really much in the way of scares. The ideas here were a lot more interesting when they were explored in '80s films like Prince of Darkness than they are today, no matter how many modern conveniences are involved. And the entire plot suffers from a drastic case of protagonitis, in which the lead characters is never attacked as quickly, often, or efficiently as the others, allowing them to survive for no good reason.
It doesn't help that there might be less talent involved in this film than almost any recent horror flick. Kristen Bell is always wonderful, but when she's paired with pretty no-talents like Somerhalder and Christina Milian in almost every scene, there's not much she can do. Of the rest of the cast, only Ron Rifkin (as the shrink) even shows a lick of talent.
Second-time director Jim Sonzero somehow landed the Hellraiser remake based on the job he does here, a bad sign for that film, as all Sonzero seems to know how to do is rip off the quick-cuts of Saw and other crappy movies. LIkewise, first-time screenwriter Ray Wright (credited alongside Wes Craven, who hasn't gotten a writing credit on a movie this bad since The Hills Have Eyes 2) couldn't write a good line of dialogue to save his life, although we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was pretty much saddled with the stupid plot from the Japanese version. He's turned his five minutes at the typewriter into a gig writing the needless remake of The Crazies.
Pulse is cinematic mediocrity at its worst, avoiding the god-awfulness of Uwe Bollville***, but not even making the effort to try to bring anything original to the screen. Don't bother wasting ninety minutes on this tripe, no matter how much you like Kristen Bell.
*Not really.
**Admittedly, if I were a pale haunting creature, I'd probably consider haunting Kristen Bell's bathtub myself.
***Population: Uwe Boll.
Oh noes! Teh intarwebs are evil! And technology, that savior of civilization, actually can hurt us! What an original concept. Certainly nothing I've seen in FearDotCom, The Ring, or eight billion other other flicks. But surely Pulse will come up with a unique and interesting twist on the theme.
Or not.
We start with a mopey kid, wandering across a college campus. He sees strange pale guys who look like rejects from Whitley Streiber movies out of the corner of his eyes every once in a while, and eventually he gets attacked in a library filled with inexplicable strobe lights, where one of the things throws books from shelves in a cheap attempt to convince the audience they're watching Ghostbusters. It then grabs his head and sucks out his soul.
We now head to a bar, to try to drown the irksomeness of the first scene with alcohol and Kristen Bell. Alas, Bell plays Mopey Girl, because she's been dating the guy from the first scene of the movie, whose name is Josh. As her annoying cannon fodder friends attempt to convince her that she should part-tay a little bit, she continues to mope. Over that night and the next day, we see how plugged-in everyone is, with cell phones, web sites, chat rooms, Neopets*, and all that other stuff college kids are into nowadays.
Eventually, Bell decides that instead of calling her boyfriend, she should actually visit him in person. On getting to his house, we meet Josh and recognize him as the mopey guy from the first scene, and he's even mopier now that his soul's been sucked. He tells her to wait a minute and heads to another room. While waiting, Bell hears a noise from the closet, and opens it to reveal that Josh has kept his trapped cat in the closet, starving nearly to death. This makes me completely unsympathetic to him or to her (for even dating him), so I'm pretty much just wishing that Josh would go and hang himself now.
Fortunately, the magic of moviemaking is all about wish fulfillment, and next scene, we have one dead cat abuser, hung poetically with either phone or cat-5 cable (it's hard to tell).
We get a few generic grief scenes (Bell's character apparently likes cat-torturers), including Bell having nightmares about Josh, Bell venting to a shrink about Josh, and Bell getting IMs and emails saying "Help Me" from Josh. She realizes that this last one is strange and not a typical sign of grief, especially since the other disposable friends are getting them, too. One of them, Stone, decides that Josh's computer must have been left on, proving that being immersed in technology doesn't mean actually understanding it. He breaks into the old apartment, sees that the computer is unplugged, and then gets jumped by a ghostly female figure.
The next day, Bell calls Stone, and he's sitting in the dark and moping. Even as Bell's Mopiness Sense tingles, Stone's arm seems to be filling with ink. Instead of checking on her friend, Bell goes to Josh's old place, and discovers that it's now for rent, but that the landlady sold the computer to That Annoying Guy From Lost (meaning Ian Somerhalder, not Matthew Fox or Dominic Monaghan), who she tracks down using her borrowed Veronica Mars detective skills. She accuses him of harassing everyone in Josh's address book, but he tells her that he still hasn't turned on the computer.
At home, Somerhalder finally turns on the computer and finds all sorts of images of people dying and looking mopey. Meanwhile, Bell and her roomie get a package from Josh that he sent before he died, containing red tape and a warning note saying that the red tape keeps the pale guys away. They also see a CNN report about the epidemic of suicides and mopeyness that's been striking the world. It's like a massive emo attack!
Somerhalder shows Bell the creepy stuff on the computer (and she sees yet another pale guy on the screen), then she sees a pale guy on her bus ride home before a professor tries to get hit by the bus, and then sees another woman throw herself off a water tower. Because this is a Japanese horror movie, we have a typically creepy dream sequence, followed by Bell seeing a pale guy in her bathtub**.
The college is getting more and more desolate, with only a handful of folks in class now. We get a few more pale guy scares (one haunts Bell in a nasty public bathroom), and then Stone's friend Tim comes looking for his buddy and sees Stone get sucked into a wall. Tim runs to his dorm room, pastes red tape over the windows and doors, and then, in a fit of stupidity, peeks out through the peephole, where he sees a pale guy who reaches through and grabs him.
Meanwhile, Bell's shrink is working late when he sees a picture of his late wife (or possibly daughter) on the computer screen before being jumped by yet another pale guy. Yes, even the really minor character die in this movie in an attempt to stretch things out for over an hour!
We get more moments of creepiness (including the famous "inkjet printer spits out a bunch of sheets that form Josh's face" scene that would be good if it didn't appear in all the commercials), and eventually, Bell's best friend goes to the laundromat, where a pale guy starts throwing laundry out of the machine she's using before attacking her. Because that's how pale guys roll.
We head to the climax, with Bell watching the aforementioned best friend disintigrate into nothingness, which actually makes t he latter a less annoying character. With Bell and Somerhalder the only survivors, they make a run through the city, encountering other panicking folks on their way to a computer company that they found info about on Josh's machine. Once there, they meet Exposition Guy. He tells them how the search for wider 'net access led to bandwidths that only the dead can use, which makes perfect sense if you smoke enough crack.
The heroes (not counting Exposition Guy, who hides in his little red-taped room) make a run to the local computer center, where they try uploading the "cure" program that Josh had waiting for them. They dodge a bunch of pale guys, and get the program uploaded, but the computer resets itself, making it all pointless.
As they run away, an airplane gratuitously crashes into the computer center, and the two survivors grab a car and head away from the city and all technology. Just when we think they're safe and napping in the middle of nowhere, the radio in the car comes on and warns people that the pale creatures attack via wireless and cell phones. Naturally, the creatures pick this moment to attack, but Somerhalder manages to drive away into an area without cell phone covereage, and the creatures fade away. They chuck Bell's cell phone out of the car, and ponder how this wonderful technology that was supposed to keep people together instead destroyed them. How deep!
If Pulse accomplishes anything, it might be to finally convince the world that just because a horror movie is a remake of an Asian film doesn't mean it won't suck. There's not an original thought in this movie, nor is there really much in the way of scares. The ideas here were a lot more interesting when they were explored in '80s films like Prince of Darkness than they are today, no matter how many modern conveniences are involved. And the entire plot suffers from a drastic case of protagonitis, in which the lead characters is never attacked as quickly, often, or efficiently as the others, allowing them to survive for no good reason.
It doesn't help that there might be less talent involved in this film than almost any recent horror flick. Kristen Bell is always wonderful, but when she's paired with pretty no-talents like Somerhalder and Christina Milian in almost every scene, there's not much she can do. Of the rest of the cast, only Ron Rifkin (as the shrink) even shows a lick of talent.
Second-time director Jim Sonzero somehow landed the Hellraiser remake based on the job he does here, a bad sign for that film, as all Sonzero seems to know how to do is rip off the quick-cuts of Saw and other crappy movies. LIkewise, first-time screenwriter Ray Wright (credited alongside Wes Craven, who hasn't gotten a writing credit on a movie this bad since The Hills Have Eyes 2) couldn't write a good line of dialogue to save his life, although we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was pretty much saddled with the stupid plot from the Japanese version. He's turned his five minutes at the typewriter into a gig writing the needless remake of The Crazies.
Pulse is cinematic mediocrity at its worst, avoiding the god-awfulness of Uwe Bollville***, but not even making the effort to try to bring anything original to the screen. Don't bother wasting ninety minutes on this tripe, no matter how much you like Kristen Bell.
*Not really.
**Admittedly, if I were a pale haunting creature, I'd probably consider haunting Kristen Bell's bathtub myself.
***Population: Uwe Boll.