PULSE (2006)

Here we go again. Will the American remake of Japanese horror films ever end? As long as there is a single penny worth of profit to be made from them, probably not. The latest J-Horror film to get the big budget, dumbed down Hollywood treatment is Pulse. The original, made by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, was a masterfully crafted and bone chillingly atmospheric horror film. It was a tad slow at times and had a few sore spots, but is easily one of the best horror films to come out of Japan in recent years. However, the American remake feels completely watered down. It relies solely on jump out scares, most of which fail, and it pretty much throws away all the elements that made the original so good. Throw in the horrible dialogue and the atrocious acting and we have all the ingredients here for a wasted opportunity.
What if our technology formed a gateway to a world beyond our own and let some really evil ghosts try to infect us and take over our lives? That's the basic premise behind Pulse, both the original and the remake. These things can get to you through emails, cell phones, and other forms of modern communication. It's a simple story and there's really not that much to it, but the original had such a creepy atmosphere and was so well made that it was the complete package. It also had likeable characters, but in the remake there's not one single likeable character amongst the bunch. Almost everyone is either annoying or just plain idiotic, and throughout the movie all you can do is sit and pray that they all meet a gruesome death.

Kristen Bell plays damsel in distress Mattie Webber, and frankly she's awful. I was hoping one of her idiot friends would strangle her during the movie. I last saw Bell in some episodes of the accomplished HBO show Deadwood, and she was fantastic, so mostly likely the problem here is some seriously rogue direction from Jim Sonzero and a poor screenplay adaptation from Ray Wright and, of all people, Wes Craven. The only person who was watchable was Brad Dourif who is in the movie for 2 minutes as a raving lunatic who spouts off about how the world is ending. I would have rather watched him prattle for an hour and a half than watch the rest of this effort.

Relative directorial newcomer Jim Sonzero doesn't appear to have been schooled particularly well in the art of filmmaking as the film has no central focus and feels extremely fragmented. A better title for the movie would have been A Series Of Very Loud And Very Random Scares That Often Miss The Mark. Every once in a while he manages to crowbar a decent moment in amongst the forced jolts and jumps, but this hardly constitutes a complete piece of entertainment. The powers that be on this movie should have followed the formula for The Grudge remake which was to get the original director of the film and give him a bigger budget to try and work his magic again. But no, they get Sonzero and with that they get a stupid movie. Watch the Kiyoshi Kurosawa version and then watch Sonzero's straight afterwards. It's a great comparison between excellent, sure handed direction, and frankly woefully direction. I wonder if Sonzero actually watched the original. If he did he basically ignored just about every single thing that made it work so well.
The special effects in the film are also very uneven. At a few spots there are some great visuals, and then at others they look pathetic and fake. There is also almost no gore or blood whatsoever. You have to love that make-horror-movies-for-kids mentality. It's been proven that you don't need to tone down violent content for a movie to make money, yet there are many bozos out there that continue to follow this approach. The movie is also strangely prone to over-the-top outbursts of horrible acting. Some of these moments do make for big laughs though, which goes down as a plus in a movie as bad as this. As the movie nears its painful conclusion, some of the thrills shape up to be almost decent and some of the dreary settings work really well along with a few ghosts that are fairly frightening, but it's all to little to late.

Pulse joins the ever growing list of failed remakes. A few decent scares, SFX, and settings can't save this very weak effort. Any time the movie feels like it's about to get on course, bad acting and truly stupid dialogue stop it dead in its tracks. It starts off with a poor opening and ends with a matching bad one just for balance. And the few decent things scattered about this mess can't save it. On the whole, this remake is a piece of bad, bland, and truly uninspired movie making.