No Pulse In This One

Americans love the Asian movies, because they buy up Asian movie properties left and right. But they must hate Asians, because, instead of just releasing the movies as is, they remake them and recast them with lily-white American casts. And, I don't know, maybe it's those missing Asians that makes Pulse such a shitty Japanese-to-American translation.

I expected a little more from Wes Craven, who adapted the screenplay from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's original script, but then, Craven hasn't written anything good since New Nightmare, and that was 12 years ago. He seems to miss the point of the original, that, even though we are now able to connect with people in more ways than ever, we are essentially isolated because we've eliminated personal contact. The people in this movie don't kill themselves because ghosts tell them to or infect them with some sort of depression virus; they kill themselves because they realize they are completely alone, regardless of how "connected" they might be to the rest of the world. But, Craven would have you believe the ghost theory. He even goes so far as to have all the characters hanging out all the time, having fun and being happy. These aren't people who would commit suicide; it really doesn't ring true.

But, I blame the no-name director more than Craven. Kurosawa, who also directed the original, is Japanese, and, therefore, is just inherently able to create a terrifying atmosphere in a movie. (This is true of all Asian directors; it's in their DNA.) Sure, his films tend to be glacially paced, almost to the point of being boring, but he never fails to deliverer the thrills. This Americanized version is the same as every other horror movie that comes out nowadays: dim-witted, spastically edited, and noisy as hell. I'm not sure why we make horror movies anymore, because they all just turn out like the same piece of shit. You can fix a lot of story errors by properly editing together a well-made movie, but this isn't well-made.

There's some other things I had a problem with. In the original movie, the red tape was to keep the ghosts in, not keep them out. Craven must have got a poorly translated version of the original script. And what's with Brad Dourif making a totally random cameo; he must be a friend of the producers.

If you want to see Pulse the way it should be, rent the Japanese original. Better yet, go see The Descent, a foreign film actually released in the States that delivers plenty of scares. Check it out instead.