Pulse [DVD]

Possibly the least scary horror film I have ever seen. After about 20 minutes I was ready to turn it off, but I thought, I've paid for it, I may as well watch it. That was a mistake on two counts. The script was awful, embarressingly so in places, and I think they could've put a baseball cap on a chimpanzee and it would've done a better job in the directors chair.

How anyone can give this this stink anything but 1 star is beyond me. (I think 1 star is generous, but I can't give zero. If I could, I would)
If anyone was actually scared by this, I think you possibly have some kind of nervous disorder.

Another reviewer stated it's about as scary as Scooby Doo. I'd go along with that. The acting was better in Scooby Doo though.

Pathetic beyond belief.

Buy something else.

Anything else.

I bought this film a few months ago and can recommend it, good story to a technical film, it kinda puts you off using a computer lol, the special affects are quite cool and the acting not bad considering its people probably no one has heard of, worth a watch.

The title notwithstanding, this film barely has a pulse of its own. What should have been an exciting thriller somehow comes across as one of the most boring apocalyptic films I've ever seen. The writers and directors were totally focused on the characters fighting to keep their wills to live from being sucked right out of their bodies - but what about my will to live? As a viewer, I was fighting to survive, as well. With electronic ghosts of ill-defined boredom closing in on me with each passing minute and a maze of loose ends to navigate along my way, I consider myself lucky to have come out the other side with my sanity intact.

So, what is this Pulse, anyway? Well, if you don't know, the movie surely isn't going to tell you - not until you're closing in on the end of it, anyway. By then, you won't even care. Sealing yourself in a small area with red tape keeps the pulse out, though, for what it's worth. Personally, I didn't have a problem with the pulse - not as long as it kept eliminating such uninteresting characters as you'll find littering this film. The most comatose of the bunch is Josh (Jonathan Tucker), the dumb hacker who manages to unleash this whole business on the world in the first place. Mattie (Kristen Bell) could use some serious training in the art of applying mascara, but you still wouldn't think the girl would be hard up enough to actually like this dweeb. Through the magic of cyberspace, Josh can't stop being annoying even in death, which leads Mattie and her gang of college buddies into this whole pulse business. Then, before you can say Bob's your uncle, the whole world is full of people either missing or walking around as empty shells of themselves (which actually sounds a lot like real life, come to think of it). So - you guessed it - it's up to Mattie and her new hacker friend to basically save the world.

But how do you stop the pulse, especially when no one in the movie has really bothered to explain just what the heck it is, anyway? Ah, there's the rub. The writers, I'm sad to say, decide to take the easy way out, so don't plan on a wham bam ending to come along and suddenly make you want to stand up and cheer. They don't even bother to address one of the seemingly important secondary plot points they kept bringing up all through the film. Why introduce something into a film on several occasions if you aren't going to follow up on it at all?

Pulse is a sad case of the "if you can't beat them, remake them syndrome" sweeping Hollywood in the last few years. In this case, even Wes Craven seems to recognize the fact that Asian horror is far superior to American horror. I haven't seen the Asian film that Pulse was based on, but it had to have a stronger story that this film did. Hollywood tends to grab an Asian film, disembowel it of all its juicy story goodness (substituting a hefty helping of CGI effects in its place), and expect it to be a success. Maybe someday they'll all figure out that this strategy just doesn't work. No matter how spiffy the CGI is, Pulse's special effects still cry "The Ring" in most viewers' ears. Let me completely doom this movie's prospects for you by comparing it to Fear Dot Com - remember how awful that movie was and how completely let down you felt after watching that trainwreck of a film? You're going to feel the same way about Pulse. Enough said.