'Pulse' is dead on arrival

The shameless marketing of Hollywood schlock reaches a new low in the print advertisements for Pulse, which feature a blurb declaring it “unlike any horror film you've seen before or will ever see!” Leaving aside the abundant precedent for such barrel-bottom junk, and the fact that you'll surely see more of its kind, the film is a remake — a remake! — of the 2001 cult hit Kairo by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

It is true that this new Pulse is nothing like the original, although it does mimic the plot fundamentals (ghosts seep through the Internet; teenagers freak out; the world comes to an end) and several visual ideas (spooky streaming video; bright red tape used to ward off spirits). Gone, however, are any traces of Kurosawa's creepy minimalism and conceptual rigor, the combination of which suggested any movie Michelangelo Antonioni might have made were he reincarnated as a Japanese horror maestro with an AOL account.

The essential mystery of Pulse has nothing to do with diabolical text messaging and what Mattie (Kristen Bell), our bimbo heroine, can do to stop it, but rather what took this remake so long. Bob and Harvey Weinstein acquired Kairo when its technophobic premise still felt timely, and then suppressed its theatrical release so that Wes Craven could make a remake. (Last year Magnolia Pictures acquired the rights to the original and released it.)

Craven (now credited as co-writer) has since dropped out, replaced by an unknown named Jim Sonzero, whose witless direction feels understandably exhausted, given the circumstances. Perhaps the delay was the result of the producers' working up the nerve to demand that posters of their other movies (Chicago, Sin City) be prominently displayed in the production design.