Truly Dreadful Film

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

One of the problems that cinema of the 1990s and 1980s is that filmmakers and audiences never really knew what they had on their hands. The Exorcist III by William Peter Blatty, for instance, was probably one of the greatest thrillers ever made and yet audiences and Hollywood executives at the time just didn't know what they had. Pulse is another example of a film that came just too early to be appreciated. It's a solid concept and a solid thriller that probably would be a bigger hit today than in the 1980s when there were no cell phones or computer controlled cars because the idea is so much scarier and more real these days. So on the one hand, Pulse suffers from being too early. But on the other hand, it's also not exactly good. When you talk about all the underrated horror gems of the 80s and 90s (Exorcist III, Pumpkinhead, In the Mouth of Madness, The Resurrected, Prince of Darkness, or Event Horizon) Pulse will never make that list because it's just too flawed. Pulse suffers from "Writer/Director disease", where there isn't enough eyes on a single scene or concept to really understand how it works. The idea of making the main character a little kid instead of the step mom (who steals the show) seems like something someone else should've mentioned during pre-production. Certain scenes feel out of place in the film and you can tell that a large part of the movie was left on the cutting room floor. I'm not saying the movie would do better with a longer running time, because in this case the film is tight enough to hang together, but a lot of ideas are picked up and dropped (voices in the wires, a tv set that seems to talk to you, other houses in the neighborhood being infected). All in all, Pulse suffers from being too early and not well defined enough from the rest of the 80s horror pack. It tries very hard to be Poltergeist but the flaws in the script and the direction just can't pull it off.

Although this film was kinda hokey, I did finish watching it. Partly, I was interested because the director got the idea from staying at my parents' house in the suburb of Norwalk, Ca during the Watts riots (we were married at the time). Too bad he hasn't done anything else since then as a director. Good choice of actors, I thought. Could it be redone with more modern CGI effects? Get his friend George to help? Make it a little darker, maybe, with a supernatural twist. Or, add another one of his ideas, which was that ideas are the fruit of an underground plant with roots connected all over the world. Perhaps that last would make a movie of its own. I'd like to see that one done.

Pulse starts in an ordinary L.A. street which is disturbed by the antics of one of it's residents named Hank Jordan who is wrecking his house with a baseball bat, the police are called & break into Hank's house but find him dead. Young David Rockland (Joseph Lawrence) is flying into L.A. from Colorado to spend some time with his Father & Stepmother Bill (Cliff De Young) & Ellen (Roxanne Hart), things go well at first but one night when David is left home alone the T.V. & other various electrical appliances seem to take a life of their own & after almost being burned alive by a pilot light David is understandably nervous. Then David hears about the stories concerning the Jordan's & what happened, David becomes convinced that there is an evil presence in his Father's house that will try to kill them, at first Bill isn't having any of it but as the mysterious 'accidents' begin to add up he starts to change his mind...Written & directed by Paul Golding I thought Pulse was an average horror/thriller that never even came close to getting my pulse racing. The script doesn't seem to know what it wants to be or who it wants to appeal too & is loose to say the least, nothing is explained in any sort of detail. What the evil electrical force is or where it came from or what it's trying to do, absolutely nothing about it is revealed. I also think that Pulse will disappoint most potential viewers in the sense that as a fan of horror films which Pulse supposedly is I was expecting a widespread outbreak of electrical devices turning against their owners all across America but in actual fact the pulse never leaves the confines of one house even though it could go anywhere & it doesn't kill a single person on screen, that's right not one person is killed in Pulse which just isn't good enough as far as I'm concerned. Instead director Golding thinks his audience would rather sit through chunks of boring dialogue, stupid unexplained narrative & an annoying teenage kid as the lead, well Mr. Golding I can tell you now that most horror fans like films which are scary & contain some semblance of horror. As it is Pulse tells it's story competently enough despite it's lack of any explanations & while there's nothing spectacular about it it's an OK way to pass 90 odd minutes if you don't expect too much.Director Golding films everything without much style or visual flair but there are a few really effective scenes in which his camera goes 'into' the electrical equipment & there are some nice close-up shots of the circuit boards & wiring as the pulse melts the solder & rearranges it for reasons I'm not sure about, these shots are easily the most memorable thing about Pulse which says it all really. Pulse isn't scary & there's not much of a horror atmosphere to it either. There are some really dumb bits at the end when David a young kid manages to stop his Father falling back by grabbing him even though his Father probably weighs three times that of David, it wouldn't work in reality would it? Neither can I forget the scene when a circular saw manages to fire a screw at Bill & hit him in the forehead! Forget about any proper gore, someone's hand gets cut, someone is burnt & a screw hits someone's forehead is all we get.Technically Pulse is alright, there's nothing really wrong with it. The acting is OK but again nothing special, Lawrence as the young kid gets very irritating.Pulse is an OK film, I'm sure there are people out there who will like it but for me it was too dull, it never explained itself & the decision not to kill anyone during the entire duration of the film was a bad one, a very bad one. There are better films out there.

Young boy David (a winning performance by Joey Lawrence of the TV show "Blossom") is spending the week with his estranged, hard-working father Bill (the always solid Cliff De Young) and new stepmother Ellen (a fine Roxanne Hart). David notices that the electricity in the house has taken on a lethal and malevolent life of its own, but can't convince either his dad or stepmom that something's amiss.Writer/director Paul Golding makes this fantastic premise seem fairly credible and extremely chilling by carefully evoking a thoroughly plausible everyday mundane world that's ripped violently asunder by a bizarre and inexplicable phenomenon (Golding's stubborn refusal to provide some kind of valid explanation for why the electricity is acting up adds a truly eerie and unnerving ambiguity to the picture). Moreover, Golding successfully creates believable and sympathetic characters and offers a gradual build-up of skin-crawling tension which culminates in a positively harrowing and nerve-wracking climax with all the electricity going dangerously haywire. Peter Lyons Collister's exceptional macro photography, Jay Ferguson's shuddery score, and the first-rate special effects further contribute to the film's sterling quality. Kudos are also in order for the uniformly ace acting; veteran character actor Charles Tyner has a colorfully quirky supporting part as a nutty old paranoid electrician and Robert Romanus (Mike Damone in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") pops up in a cool cameo as a smooth-talking TV repairman. Spooky and intense, "Pulse" rates as a real nifty little sci-fi/horror sleeper.