Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Horrorfest 2014: Pulse

Now it's time for some Japanese horror with PULSE from 2001. Unfortunately I'm not really sure what it was about so it's kind of hard to give a brief overview. Kinda like Argento's flicks, only moreso, PULSE has some cool images to look at and some chilling sequences but they ultimately don't add up to anything. Or, if they do, I don't know what it is.

The story follows a girl (Kumiko Aso) investigates the mysterious suicidal hanging of her co-worker (Kenji Mizuhashi) and finds ghostly images on a disk he left behind, seemingly coming out of his computer monitors. Later investigations yield creepy stuff like giant black stains on the wall where he killed himself, his "ghost" repeating, "Help me," and other weird stuff.

Meanwhlie a student (Haruhiko Kato) whose internet connection seems to have a mind of its own, cycling through several grisly and disturbing images.

The whole movie is a slow build, with lots of creepy looking ghosts and legitimate scares. The problem is the pay off. You're never really clear what's going on, and eventually it gets to the point where we move into post-apocalyptic territory.


In this sense, it's kind of like a nightmare where you wake up and think, "I don't know what has happening, but that was scary." Does that make it a successful horror movie? I dunno. I personally like to be able to engage in the story and characters more, but if you want to be sure to see some super suspenseful scenes and scary images, you'll find plenty of that with PULSE.

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