Pulse 2001 Magnolia Pictures Official Website Buy It Now

There has been a great deal of buzz around Japanese latest horror export Kairo, known here in the United States as Pulse. In fact, there has been more than enough to warrant the film being picked up and added to the list of remakes. It does seem a bit odd to me however that while a movie studio will grab the rights to do an English version, they seldom will release the original, though I would assume the reasoning would be so that unsuspecting film goers think that the movie was created in Hollywood. Luckily there are other companies that are more than willing to grab Japanese films and release them on DVD, usually prior to the theatrical run of our remakes. Kairo isn’t any different.

Finding what I could online about the film, the general consensus seems to be that Pulse is one of the scariest films to come out of Japan in quite some time. Bold claims to be certain, and with that in mind, there is a lot that the film needs to live up to in my eyes. Not just that, up until a few years ago, horror was my selected genre of choice and I’ve ultimately been desensitized to everything and have grown very accustomed to finding the predictability in the modern age of horror.

Pulse comes from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (of no relation to the late Akira Kurosawa) and while he has been the man behind other horror films such as Kyua and Kourei, this is the film that has gotten everyone excited. The film takes the saying of a “ghost in the machine” to a completely different level. A group of college students are trying to locate a friend, Taguchi, who has developed a computer program, but with little luck. A visit to his apartment finally gets the disc they need, but there’s just one problem; he’s dead, even though some have seen his spirit. This is merely the beginning.

Another college student, an economic major named Kawashima has been trying to get online, but he’s instead found himself on a webpage featuring a dark, shadowy figure and then text asking him if he’d like to meet a ghost. Those close to Taguchi have also been finding the same images on the web and Kawashima decides to investigate further. He approaches Harue, a computer science major who instructs him to get what information he can. Soon, the two find that one by one, their friends are dying and it all seems to be connected to the Internet and the mysterious “Forbidden Room.”

Pulse, like many of the films from the “new wave” of Japanese horror films is dark, it’s gritty, and it’s quite atmospheric, but when it comes to unleashing frights, it falls quite short of what many other have claimed. Since, as mentioned, I’m a bit unbothered when it comes to horror, I have another way to gauge just how many scares a film might have. That duty unwittingly falls upon my wife, something of a “horror virgin.” I’ve seen her grip the couch during films like the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn, cover her eyes during Evil Dead and even look away from the screen during Fulci’s classic City of the Living Dead. She has admitted being afraid while watching Ringu (though disliked the US remake) and has only seen but a scant few minutes of Ju-on and insisted it was turned off. She sat through Pulse, start to finish, and wasn’t bothered in the least.

The movie really tries to tell something of a philosophical tale, showing to some extent how humanity’s reliance on technology can get the best of him and that something such as the Internet can lead to addiction. As Pulse moves on, we find more and more people trying to locate the mysterious website and believing that this will bring them some sort of happiness in their lonely lives. Ultimately, they commit suicide, and these scenes are some of the best things in the movie and are done extremely well. They aren’t graphic however, and I’ve noticed few of the Japanese horror films are, but seeing something such as a young girl walking to the top of a water tower and throwing herself off while the camera maintains a steady shot with no edits is a great moment in filmmaking in my opinion. I just wish the rest of the film could be that way.

The film is too long, featuring some sequences that really could have been edited down to make the story flow much better. There are occasional cuts that seem quite rough and make the film a bit too jumpy. A long moment of silence and dark corridors in a horror film is good, but when it leads to nothing, that’s not a great approach. Pulse all too often tries to raise your level of paranoia only to simply let you down by sending you headlong into nothing or giving you some mock scare that has already become nothing more than a predicted outcome.

Pulse tends to be a film that requires more thought process than most, but even in retrospect, I feel that this is a film that few people are going to get. It’s much like what I was told by an employee at a video store regarding two films years ago; Pi and Cube. Everyone he had talked with didn’t like Pi as it was too confusing, but they loved Cube. I was one of the few that didn’t follow that trend, and Pulse is another film that for some would fall in line with Pi. You really need to think about what’s going on, but even so, the effort to tell a chilling moralistic tale falls short of its original intent. Fans of Kurosawa’s other films have stated that Pulse may or may not be a follow up to the film Circuit, but having not seen it, I have no way to confirm this. However, if this is in fact true, perhaps the two films being viewed together might create a clearer picture than what Pulse does by itself.

There are only two special features for the DVD. One of them is the Japanese trailer for the film while the other claims to be a Behind-the-Scenes making of. The making of featurette is nothing more than the director setting up a series of different shots and worrying about what should and shouldn’t be included in the scene. The actors and briefly introduced, but this isn’t anything that is going to shed any light on the already muddled story.

Ringu may have been the film that paved the way for the recent popularity of Japanese horror here in North America, but it’s led to a series of problems. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon these days, and if it was made in Japan and might scare someone, you can be assured that it will be picked up to either be remade or simply released on DVD. Pulse isn’t going to be one of those films that will leave lasting impression on most, and although it may be been made before some of the other imports, it ends up being nothing more than a lengthy journey that slams you into a state of perplexity at the end.

-mike-