Oh dear. When will people learn? Okay, we’re going over this from the top. Horror movies ought to be the preserve of hungry young directors who spend far too much time in video stores and online. Or else they need to come from Korea or Japan. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fantastically creepy Kairo is a good example, remade here as big budget trash long after the film’s Luddite fear of new technologies seemed relevant.
Jim Sonzero’s version, co-written by Wes Craven, who wisely bowed out of the project, bares some faint resemblance to Kurosawa’s film – ghosts emerge through the internet, torment teenagers on campus and bring about the apocalypse. The mise en scene also curtseys toward all the right things – Romero, early end-of-the-world Cronenberg, Bosch, Triffids and the Ringu cycle.
Trouble is, Pulse can’t make the script or characters amount to anything more than teenbot 5000 units caught up in a standard issue horror. Even Shaggy and Scooby know to turn on light bulbs and to avoid double clicking on mysterious websites asking “Do You Want To Meet A Ghost?” The world’s population has already halved by the time Last Girl Matty (Bell) stops listening to her psyche professor (Rifkin) pooh-poohing the notion that anything irrational might be going on.
Worse, Pulse totally overreaches and overcooks itself. Where Kairo gloomed by on existential minimalism, this film keeps putting jam on it. By the end, for all the money spent, it feels as though we’re watching one of Troma’s sub-sub-sub-genre horror flicks. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the world’s first cyber-zombie teen-suicide apocalypse movie! Erm, no thanks. I’m doing the ironing tonight.