One day I might actually stop spending money on unscary horror movies that I know are going to be bad. That day hasn't come yet. And the latest milestone on this particular road to hell is Pulse, another damn J-Horror remake, this time of the film that more or less birthed the genre.

I never saw Kurosawa Kiyoshi's original; it played in Chicago at exactly one theater for exactly one week last December. I do not hear good things (as in most non-French cases, the work that ushers in an artistic movement suffering from all that movement's flaws rather than benefitting from all of its merits). But I do know this: it is a better film than director Jim Sonzero and writer Wes Craven were able to cobble together.

As is somewhat-well known, and as I've even mentioned before, Pulse was originally to have been released in February...then April...then July, constantly being pushed back until the studio could secure a PG-13 rating. Around March, when it became obvious that this would happen, they ordered reshoots to de-gorify the offending scenes. I don't necessarily hold the mere fact of reshoots against a film, although very few good movies have ever come about from such a situation, but in the case of a nominal horror film I think it's hard to defend such a frightened retreat from the Big Bad R. In his youth - his nasty, disgusting youth - Craven would never have stood for such a thing. But for whatever reason (no, not for whatever reason, for extremely obvious reasons of marketability) the filmmakers quite gave up here, and it speaks volumes about the mercenary quality that no doubt infected every member of the cast and crew at every point in production.

It's a confusing mess, but broadly it's the story of Mattie (Kristen Bell), whose boyfriend Josh has just killed himself. Upon investigating the reason why, Mattie and her focus-group friendly posse of ethnographically-correct companions discover that his computer somehow became a conduit for angry ghosts to come in and suck the will to live out of everyone on the network. Blah, blah, blah, stalking scenes and Mattie meets Dexter (Ian Somerhalder*) who bought Josh's computer and knows enough about computers to explain what's happening. His explanation is apparently correct within the world of the film, a world in which the internet does not work as it does here (sadly, he makes no reference to tubes).

If there was a taut, rich horror movie going on around all this, I'd cut the ghastly perversion of computer science a little bit of slack. Willing suspension of disbelief, and all of that. But Pulse is neither taut nor rich, it is not horrifying, and in retrospect I have some doubt that it was actually a movie. It is a string of stalking scenes, all of which play out precisely the same way, and not a single one of which is even remotely frightening.

This seems like an aside, but it's not: editing is hard to explain. Oh, it's easy to say, "see how that image switched to another? That's a cut," but it's incredibly difficult even for one who studied it to explain why a cut works the way it does. In the case of Pulse, the difficulty is explainign why the cuts don't work. I can say that I have never seen a film so entirely neutered by its editor, but that is unhelpful and vague. Still, there is perhaps no single explanation for why the film fails so entirely as its editing. It is very quick and hyper, and it makes it very difficult to figure out what spacial relationships are, and there are lots of CGI-aided cuts that are really just obnoxious to look at. It sucks the atmosphere right out of the film.

Would a different editor make a better film? Perhaps. The performances are surprisingly decent for a cheap teen-targeted genre film, and I don't think that's just my raging lust for Kristen Bell talking (said lust is partially out of respect for her actorly abilities). Ian Somerhalder is much better here than he was on Lost, and the supporting characters aren't complete shit. This puts them well on the positive side of the curve for horror day players. Still, it's hard to argue that anyone here is more than competent. The only real standout in the cast - actually, let's call it the only positive element of the whole damn film - is Brad Dourif's one-scene turn as "Thin Bookish Guy," a gibbering insane hobo who talks about how the world is going to die. That Dourif knows that it's a crap speech in a crap movie is beyond doubt, but he McKellans the living hell out of it.

Other than that, it's just goofy and pointless and nonsensical. Towards the end some effort is made to bend the piece into a social commentary about our reliance on computers, and all I could think is how lucky we are to have someone like George Romero, who is actually capable of making cheap horror pictures that can bear the weight of that sort of pontificating, and how much better this concept would have been if he'd been making the film. Instead we've got a commercial veteran, and damned if that's not exactly what Pulse feels like, with all of the vacuous kinesis of a TV ad, with the most hackneyed possible stylistic flourishes the only trace of a voice.

And now I will discuss Mark Plummer, the cinematographer. Now, the film doesn't look very pretty, in the "let's frame this image" sort of way. Nor does the cinematography cohere very well to the rest of the film. Nor indeed is it internally coherent. But I can't fault Plummer, even so. He clearly had a fun time shooting this. As indeed the only fun I had watching it was trying to figure out the lighting set-ups. Getting to spend an entire shoot playing with shadows, getting the contrast as stark as possible, having lights flicker just because, and all those neat little tracking shots - the camera and grip crews did a lot, but I imagine they had a ball while they were doing it. I bet being on set was awesome. So that kind of justifies something, right?

Nope.

2/10