“Do you want to meet a ghost?”
Even Kristen Bell – teenage sleuth of Veronica Mars, songstress of Frozen, a woman so goddamn likeable that she made Dax Shephard seem like a catch – was not immune to the wave of forgettable, largely PG-13 horror movies that overran American theaters in the mid-00s. Pulse falls squarely into this category. It should come as no surprise – in the wake of The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water – that Pulse is a remake of a Japanese horror film, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo. J-horror remakes were all the rage for a solid ten years, and Pulse dutifully features creepy kid ghosts with sunken eyes and black hair. What it doesn’t feature is a convincing argument for being made.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s the germ of a good story here. Technology, understood by so few yet used by so many, has been an inspiration to horror writers going back at least as far as Demon Seed (Stephen King’s Cell is probably the best techno-horror book I’ve read, but to be honest I haven’t read many). So on paper, I really like the story of a hacker opening a Pandora’s box of otherworldly evil through a computer modem. In execution, though, Pulse doesn’t quite come through. One might blame the truly disinterested direction by Jim Sonzero, who contributes little to the film beyond a neo-noirish blue and black color scheme that is slightly arresting at first, but later serves to make everything a little too muddled.
The opening is intriguing enough, with Josh Ockmann (Jonathan Tucker, a long way from Hannibal and Justified) entering a spooky library looking for someone called Ziegler (sadly, not The West Wing‘s Toby Ziegler, which would have made for a fun crossover). He’s attacked by a ghostly but humanoid monster, who appears to suck his soul out through is face. It’s a cool visual, to be sure, but let’s be honest: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out two years prior, with its soul-sucking Dementors, so the visual influence is easy to spot. Josh’s girlfriend Mattie (Bell), after a week of not being able to reach him, visits him at his apartment, where he acts strange and then promptly hangs himself with a phone cord (I’ll be honest, the abruptness of Josh’s suicide was morbidly effective).
I have a few problems with Mattie and her whole friend group, which I’ll waste your time by going into, because Pulse isn’t a film that merits an in-depth analysis. First of all, Bell and Tucker don’t look anything like two people who would be dating. Second, I’m pretty sure Mattie and her friend Izzie (Christina Milian, who I think took this role on the condition she could show off her abs in every other scene) seem to hang out only with guys who blatantly want to get in their pants, namely Samm Levine’s Tim and Rick Gonzalez‘s Stone. I have a major problem with Gonzalez, who I’m aware is a random actor to be picking a bone with, and it’s this: his hairstyle never changes. It’s the same in Pulse as it was in Coach Carter, Old School, or Reaper. It might be a strange thing to get hung up on, but it makes it so that all of Gonzalez’s characters blur together, so he’s never playing anyone besides himself. That’s fine if you’re Charlie Sheen or Amy Schumer, who only play characters named Charlie or Amy, but Rick Gonzalez isn’t a brand.
Pulse does itself a huge disservice by not fully explaining its mythology. It’s not exactly a dense movie, and it’s only 88 minutes long, but I’ll be damned if I can explain what the ghosts are, what they want, or where they come from. As best as I can tell, they want what they can’t have – life – and are breaching the rift between lives in order to get it. It all means less than nothing, and I also can’t explain why the ghosts are using technology as a way to steal life from the living. This creates a problem for Pulse – horror movies live and die on the strength of their underlying mythology. Rosemary’s Baby, for instance, isn’t scary the whole way through, but the plotting is so solidly constructed that it sucks you in nonetheless. This would be forgivable if Pulse were scary, but it isn’t. The movie is ten years old, and as a genre, horror matures very quickly. If you want to be scary in the wake of modern classics like The Babadook or It Follows, you kind of have to knock it out of the park (see Cujo for a good example of this).
But here’s the thing: I fucking love the ending to this dumb movie. It shows a scope and a scale not previously hinted at, and it’s only in the last few minutes that you realize Pulse isn’t a ghost story, it’s an apocalypse story, albeit one told on a very personal, intimate scale. It’s the only time that Sorenzo – and his screenwriters Wes Craven (!) and Ray Wright (The Crazies) – shows any originality. There are some genuinely stirring shots of an obliterated landscape, including a shot of a crashing plane that’s effective precisely because it’s not presented as a big deal, that show the full devastation of the virus. Throughout Pulse, you wonder how Mattie and Dexter (Ian Somerhalder, playing the kind of gearhead-cum-computer expert that has never, ever, ever existed) are going to eradicate the virus, but they don’t. Society crumbles. There’s a point to be made here about how technology unites but also isolates us, a point that I think is best addressed by a better-made film. Pulse isn’t quite clever enough to follow that thread, and quite frankly it isn’t very good, but goddamnit, I have a soft spot for films that have the balls to end on such a dark note.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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