Director: Jim Sonzero, US, 15, 90min
Stars: Kristen Bell, Ian Somerhalder, Christina Milian, Rick Gonzalez
On general release
The latest Hollwyood remake of a Japanese horror hit, Pulse has the advantage of being based on a film (Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo) that is a lot less well known than the Grudge or Ring pictures. However, it turns out to be the same mixture as usual. Sonzero tries to hammer Kurosawa’s interesting-if-off- putting supernatural epic into a gloomy teen movie, spotlighting pretty people from hit TV shows. Blurry CGI spooks strike down the unwary at random in this piece-together- the-plot puzzle that several years of rewrites and a couple of post-preview re-shoots have done little to clear up.
Set in Ohio but shot in Romania, the film follows a psychology major (Veronica Mars’s Bell) and a student hacker (Lost’s Somerhalder) as they investigate an epidemic of suicides linked to a computer virus that can apparently infect people. There are a few scary moments, but also a lot of scenes in which people rant meaninglessly about the perils of ghosts taking over the internet.
KIM NEWMAN