Pulse -- 2006 -- PG-13

So I'm about to tick off all the J-Horror enthusiasts who saw the original Kairo from 2001 and say this American remake made a lot more sense than the Japanese original. Yup, I've seen them both. The premise is basically the same, but the American version set it up better and explained it better and ended it better. If you want the Japanese plot, you can search for my Kairo review.

We open up with a guy meeting someone in a library, but instead, he's met with a freaky looking ghost. He goes AWOL for several days before his girlfriend decides to check on him. When she does, she finds one messed up guy who kills himself while she's there. Suddenly, people start dropping like flies all over the place; it's one suicide after another and the population is dropping like a stone.

Meanwhile, the boyfriend who killed himself is begging for help on a chat board leading someone to go over to his old apartment to make sure his machine is logged off. Once there, this someone find no machine hooked up at all, but a room covered in red tape. He checks out the room and the bad ghosty gets him too. The computer is sold off to a guru with whom the girlfriend gets in touch. Together, they work to find dead boyfriend's buddy to find out what he did and how to possibly stop it.

This movie was all two things: the plot which wasn't bad and a message which was very obvious. Nearly every piece of what happened was explained here, unlike the Japanese version which preferred ambiguity to explanation. We understand the point of the red tape and what those rooms are supposed to be. I suspect their purpose is different than Kairo, or maybe this was just how the American writers interpreted it so it made sense. We were a bit ripe with coincidence, but those aside, I understood the reasoning behind what was going on. 

I did find going into the computer room a bit weird followed by going into this basement area. If their goal was going to be the basement why stop at the computer room? Also, was every ghost dangerous or just the main one? If the bad guys could come through cell phones, why didn't our heroine just turn hers off? And my biggest beef: if boyfriend had the solution, why did he leave it for others to find? Why not use it? An upload can come from anywhere to anywhere.

The message here is that the technology intended to bring us closer will take away our will to live and destroy us. Sound familiar? It's a doomsday film, plain and simple. It was presented as a horror flick, but all that did was drive off the doomsday flickers and tick off the horror flickers. If anything contributed to this film's failure, that did. It was presented incorrectly.

To touch on characters, they really were vehicles to drive the plot on. They had no past, no dreams, no nothing. Just people you watch go through this plot.

So in the end, it's not a bad film. It was very easy to watch, there were some genuinely creepy moments (not scary, but creepy), and a plot that made a lot more sense than its predecessor. If you're looking for the next Ring, look elsewhere. If you want something fairly decent to pass the time, it's not a bad choice.