Wow... that was a disappointing mess. And I say that as someone who went into the film with very low expecations. Even though it had my lovebird Kristen Bell in it, and she looked gorgeous throughout, and was co-written by Wes Craven (not that writing is especially Wes' strong suit).
Pulse took the things that really worked about the original film, Kairo (my review here), such as a strong sense of atmosphere and cinematography and art direction - it had maybe the scariest damned ghosts I have maybe ever seen put to film - and turned them to crap, and took the one thing that Kairo lacked, which was coherence in its storyline, far too seriously.
A bit of a trade-off, really; I feel like having watched Kairo before added tension to Pulse that I probably wouldn't have found there if I hadn't seen the original before - knowing what was about to happen (Pulse is pretty close to a Xerox of the original, scene-to-scene-wise, from what I recall) made Pulse scarier, to me, then I could tell it had any right to be. But I feel like now, if I go back and watch Kairo, I'll like it more because Pulse cleared up some of the ambiguity that bothered me about Kairo - from scene to scene it was really hard to tell who each character was, how they were related to each other, and what their function in the entire storyline exactly was. Pulse, if nothing else, did a good job of clearing that up.
But the stuff that really worked about Kairo, and made it a memorable film, for me, was the visuals and the increasing sense of hopelessness that permeated the film, and Pulse just messed it up every time it was supposed to do what a scary movie does, i.e. scare you. The ghosts were too digitalized, and did this crappy-looking static thing every time they appeared, and then suddenly they speed up and fill the entire frame with their eyes or gaping white maws and, sorry, that is decidedly not scary. It might make me jump, like the first time you do it, but then I'm just staring at a guy in pancake make-up with a lot of screaming sound effects blaring at me.
The ghosts in Kairo were creepy, they moved slowly and with off-putting, just-plain-wrong movements. They were in shadow most of the time; they looked like smudges on the frame. They were not pixelated dances of light that stumbled out of a Korn video.
But I still love you, Kristen Bell. Even if they did make you act as if Ian Somerholder deserved to share your frame.
.
Pulse took the things that really worked about the original film, Kairo (my review here), such as a strong sense of atmosphere and cinematography and art direction - it had maybe the scariest damned ghosts I have maybe ever seen put to film - and turned them to crap, and took the one thing that Kairo lacked, which was coherence in its storyline, far too seriously.
A bit of a trade-off, really; I feel like having watched Kairo before added tension to Pulse that I probably wouldn't have found there if I hadn't seen the original before - knowing what was about to happen (Pulse is pretty close to a Xerox of the original, scene-to-scene-wise, from what I recall) made Pulse scarier, to me, then I could tell it had any right to be. But I feel like now, if I go back and watch Kairo, I'll like it more because Pulse cleared up some of the ambiguity that bothered me about Kairo - from scene to scene it was really hard to tell who each character was, how they were related to each other, and what their function in the entire storyline exactly was. Pulse, if nothing else, did a good job of clearing that up.
But the stuff that really worked about Kairo, and made it a memorable film, for me, was the visuals and the increasing sense of hopelessness that permeated the film, and Pulse just messed it up every time it was supposed to do what a scary movie does, i.e. scare you. The ghosts were too digitalized, and did this crappy-looking static thing every time they appeared, and then suddenly they speed up and fill the entire frame with their eyes or gaping white maws and, sorry, that is decidedly not scary. It might make me jump, like the first time you do it, but then I'm just staring at a guy in pancake make-up with a lot of screaming sound effects blaring at me.
The ghosts in Kairo were creepy, they moved slowly and with off-putting, just-plain-wrong movements. They were in shadow most of the time; they looked like smudges on the frame. They were not pixelated dances of light that stumbled out of a Korn video.
But I still love you, Kristen Bell. Even if they did make you act as if Ian Somerholder deserved to share your frame.
.
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