Pulse

A group of teenagers (isn’t it always?) stumbles upon a hidden website that stores within it an evil virus that takes down every electrical object and component in the world. It is up to said teenagers to stop the evil before they are randomly picked off and killed in many uninteresting ways. Can they stop the Pulse? Do we care?

I will be the first to admit that I thought the American remakes of Ring and Ju-on were horrendous (I haven’t seen the remake of Dark Water). I am sorry to say that this is yet another to add to that list. The Americans have a way of destroying what could be an interesting, atmospheric story and instead opt to shove in as many SFX and wooden actors as they see fit. The original Pulse (Kairo) was in fact a confusing, sombre, very dark movie with a slightly confusing story line due to the translation boundaries, but the American version hasn’t fixed any of this and has instead added a few done-to-death scares by way of crashing things, loud noises, and other randomly placed nods to other horror movies.

The characters in this movie themselves don’t do anything to enhance the dull story either. Kristen Bell plays lead character Mattie Webber, Ian Somerhalder plays Dexter McCarthy, Christina Milian (you may remember her as the girl who slaughtered an Aerosmith song in Be Cool) plays Isabell Fuentes, and Rick Gonzalez plays Stone. Now these four alone have the power to make the movie either good or bad but instead of being original they play the characters the same way as every other teenaged horror movie participant. The saving grace for this movie would be the mysterious dark figures that pop up at random intervals to make this dull movie just that bit more watchable.

I could rant on for hours but I won’t. If you enjoy a horror movie like the remake of The Fog then go see this. It’s not as bad; but then again it’s not in the same league as any good horror movie either.