Dir. Jim Sonzero (2006)
A group of teens must fight off the end of the world, caused by computer demons.
Japanese horror films were all the rage in the early 2000's, with Ringu and Kairo helping to introduce the Western world to the scarier parts of Asian cinema. Lots of films from the area received American remakes, following the incredible popularity of The Ring: Dark Water became Dark Water, One Missed Call likewise garnered an American remake of the same name, and Pulse... well, you get the drift. While Ringu's American remake is one of the scariest films ever made, the Kristen Bell-icized Pulse... not so much.
Bell stars as Mattie, a teenager who's hacker friend kills himself in front of her when she goes to check on him after he has disappeared for the previous week. She discovers, with the help of the dude who bought her friend's computer (Ian Somerhalder) from his shitty landlord (played by the amazing Octavia Spencer, who was really hard up for roles at this point in her career), that her friend was developing computer code that accidentally released a "computer ghost suicide epidemic" (boy, if I had a dollar...) into the net-o-sphere. As more and more people begin committing suicide, the ghostly power grows, and it's up to Anna from Frozen and Damon from The Vampire Diaries to stop them and save the world.
Pulse is an average effort at best, appealing to the Japan remake craze of the era while adding absolutely nothing new and bungling most of what made the original so effective. It's rarely scary, even when it tries, and it's a lackluster attempt at American-izing something that wasn't particularly Japan-ified in the first place. Kairo was a message about technology and its dangers, with more than a little cultural critique and even references to the horrors of World War II. Pulse says internet bad. While sure, there's a little more to it than that, that was the general message, and it's utter nonsense.
There is a lot to be said about how when we're all connected by the internet, we're even less connected with each other in real life. Today, that message is even more clear, with so many people descending into internet rabbitholes that a lot of people think JFK Jr., who notably died in 1999, will miraculously become Donald Trump's running mate in 2024. Flat earthers have become almost commonplace, espousing a new theory about the planet we live on that was roundly debunked around the time of the Fall of Rome. I can get the telephone number of a pizza place in Kenya, but it's tough to find someone on the internet I don't want to justifiably punch in the face. My point is, there's a lot to hate the internet for without resorting to "email demons."
I get that that's the point of this film, I really do. It's just that Kairo was so much deeper, so much of a more in-depth exploration of mortality, loneliness, and the technological impacts of all of the recent advancements in computers and the internet. To boil all that down to computer ghosts feels like a huge missed opportunity. And it's unfortunate, because the actors involved in Pulse are better than average for a horror film. When you have nothing to say, however, it becomes pretty clear from the jump, and Pulse has even less to say than that.
Who this movie is for: Horror remake fans, Supernatural horror lovers, Gmail users
Bottom line: Pulse is one of the worst American remakes of a Japanese horror because it fails on every level that made the original so amazing. It's not scary, it's surface level critique of technology, and it wastes the potential for creating a movie whose scares rival The Ring. What we're left with is a shallow commentary on technology and the fears that are entirely unjustified, as we can see because we have yet to succumb to the internet ghosts lurking behind our screens almost twenty years later. This isn't one you need to see, unless you're just a particularly big remake stan.
